Situation with OPIE and Angstrom

Hello htc-pxa,

  This is follow up to the discussion we had on IRC regarding
situation OPIE has in Angstrom. As and OPIE packages maintainer, I
discussed this situation with Angstrom maintainers.

  So, the outcome of this discussion is not that bright - the Angstrom
maintainers declined to readd support for building OPIE image using
Angstrom distro config, which was removed about a month ago or so. The
reasons they gave is that Angstrom is nearing its release date (to
remind, anticipated version is called 2007.1), and it is currently in
"remove unsupported features" phase. The Angstrom maintainers are
concerned with quality of the release, and would rather disable
semi-working stuff, than let it contaminate quality of the release.
This goes up to even allowing building OPIE images with "Angstrom"
label, what, as they anticipate, going to confuse users, add support
burden, and negatively affect perceived Angstrom quality.

  Well, this is common practice, and they are quite understood in such
attitude. This leaves question open, what to use as the base for
OPIE-based distribution. I see two possibilities:

1. Use other existing distro as a base.
2. Start new distro.

  The #1 choice is mostly limited to Familiar or OpenZaurus, unless we
want to go to far. But note that these distros are essentially
"legacy", offering older software set and limited target scope.

  So, while I strong opponent of creating other entities without
necessity, this seems like the case which may be exactly grounded.

  I would like to propose you to consider and discuss, if we (as HTC
porting project and OPIE packages maintainer) would be interested to
work together on such distribution. Note that we would like have
slightly different aims for this project, though I don't think it
would be hard to achieve mutually benefiting compromise. But before
proceeding with that, I'd like you to consider 2 choices above in the
first place.

Thanks,

-- 
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml_at_gmail.com