I made the "mistake" yesterday, I enabled the dev repo and started installing programs, this, that, that, this.... The memory information tool says I have 2GB of memory, so who cares?
Until the moment that my phone froze.. 0 bytes free in root.. Package manager not working anymore (couldn't remove applications).. Now what?

For a customer that pays hard money for its phone this would be a nightmare, wouldn't it?

Luckyly I had installed SSH and Midnight Commander, so I could starting cleaning up the mess.

Resume: this would really happen, warnings or not... The question is, how can we as developers/testers prevent this from happening? If Maemo gets mainstream in a few years this simply may not happen.

The question I have is: why is the package manager not smart enough to refuse to install applications in the wrong location? (with a special developers mode that you need to enable by shell or something) Or simply correcting the install path.. It would force the developer to think about and install in the correct location.

I personally hate the fact that Linux puts all applciations in the same few directories... But that's another story.

Fair?

Wkr,
Joep