[olpc-software] No package manager?

[Jim Gettys]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 16:20 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> Jim Gettys wrote:
> > We have agreed that rather than continuing arguing we'd go off and try
> > to talk to people who are actually deploying systems into schools to see
> > what their experience is.
> > 
> > I've argued to Chris that it will be necessary; flash is tight, and
> > sharing of applications that may have multiple different dependencies I
> > believe common.  Whether my experience on the iPAQ is directly
> > applicable is an interesting question: there, we even felt the need for
> > orphan detection and elimination.
> 
> Yeah, it's not clear to me how many we're talking about and if what they 
> require will be part of the operating system.  I think the right answer 
> here might be "let's figure out what they are using and make sure that 
> the operating system contains the right components."

And my experience (admittedly on a machine with less flash), was that
the set of defined components we were willing to define by "fiat" were
always available wasn't able to be big enough to cover what was needed
and leave enough space for everything else people wanted.

So we'll have to figure this out, and I think it takes real data from
deployments of various sorts to do so.  Even tougher is that deployments
to date in other environments have generally been on much larger disks,
so even this data is suspect.  As I've thought about it, I'm becoming
convinced we'd better leave our options open in this area.
				- Jim