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Originally Posted by TadW
Scotty with all due respect I think Adam's proposal is more than sufficient for our purposes. And it seems iRex is trying hard to improve the firmware to come in our direction.
You raised some important points that obviously need to be addressed. For now though it's probably enough to mention to "Average Joe" that he should always keep his storage card inserted while running custom apps.
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"More than sufficient", really?
Adam's proposal totally fails at what I think is a fundamental detail of the iLiad: there will be more upgrades.
Your root filesystem will be replaced, erased back to factory defaults, ipkg databases reset, symbolic links removed... What state will the applications on the memory cards be in then? When you click on them after iDS gets done with your iLiad what will happen? How will your Average Joe reset the applications back to a functional state? Will they get to keep all their laboriously entered options/configurations or will everything get set back to default?
Adam himself states on his own blog he's not detail oriented. Packaging systems live and die by details that Adam is seemingly not interested in.
iRex has shown no evidence to me of being hard at work fixing the firmware. With 2.9.5 they've bricked several iLiads and there is still no way to re-flash a bricked iLiad in the field? Any
competent Linux firmware developer could have had that ability working before the very first iLiad ever left Germany. M told me at the beginning of November that the development work to allow field reflashing of iLiads was "under control and progressing well".
Help me out here TadW, how many months ago was that? Six right? Half a year? Hard at work?
With all due respect TadW, if I worked that hard, I'd be out of a job. And deservedly so.
Unfortunately the only people that can implement a packaging system for the iLiad are iRex. They control how the upgrades are done. They (barely) control er_registry.txt and contentLister. Only they can address the numerous fundamental flaws in the kernel they've deployed on the iLiad.
The existing ZIP file deployment scheme may not be the best but it excels in one fundamental area: it keeps itself out of the root filesystem and done correctly it requires zero effort to maintain installed applications across upgrades. The same x48 has worked on all versions released with no need for reinstall.