[rwhitby]

Over the last few weeks, I have been on a crusade to create an open, interoperable homebrew ecosystem, where authors upload an application to a site of their choice, and users can use *any* application installer to access homebrew applications from *all* such sites.

I'm now pleased to announce that the two leading sites containing collections of homebrew applications have publicly stated their intention to support such an open, interoperable homebew ecosystem:

http://forums.precentral.net/homebre...ml#post1806382

http://forums.precentral.net/homebre...ml#post1807081

I want to publicly thank these sites for agreeing to create the best solution for the homebrew application developers and all Pre homebrew users.

I'm hoping to get a similar public pledge from PreGame for the fileCoaster application. I believe the second post above covers the PreLoad installer applications. I also hope to get a public pledge from the WebOS Quick Install author.

Once we have those, then I think this effort to create an open, interoperable ecosystem of normal homebrew webOS applications will be self-sustaining, and then we can focus on how to make the installation of homebrew modifications, services and plugins that require commands to be run as root on the Pre to be just as easy as the installation of normal webOS applications, without opening up any security holes in the process.

The WebOS Internals development group maintains an example of the standard ipkg feed format at htp://ipkg.preware.org/feeds/preware/all/ and is willing to help any developers of application repository sites or application installers to support that standard ipkg feed format.

-- Rod