As I long time linux user I really like the benefits of the apt-get system and central repositorys.
However OpenCDS follows a completely different idea, and is especially for games much more suited.
The main point about the distribution repositorys is that of a stable officially & centrally administrated repository. Sure you can add external rescources, but not very user friendly and always with the danger of messing up your main system. And official updates are always slow and conservative.
OpenCDS on the other hand is almost completely decentralized (downloads could even be done via bittorrent of a similar P2P system), operated only in user-space and can be used for a release quick and often policy with minimal hassle for the users.
In addition it itegrates neatly with the browser, thus the addition of new sources is as easy as it gets and it could even be used to advertise (in the sense of news, not comercials) new projects.
Good point actually. Another thing to consider is there's limited internal memory (256mb) too. While it may theoretically be possible to design Debian/apt-get packages to install some things to the memory card that would only be the start of the headache.
Apt-get or similar should definitely be used for the base system and common libraries. Everything else could be stand alone packages with a custom extension such as .ppk (pandora package?), which are really just zips or tarballs and will open with an installer ask where on the SD card to install, and will never touch the base system EXCEPT, and this is the magical part, for feeding the dependencies to apt-get.
Such a program to handle these packages would be very trivial to write. Keeping it simple is a good way to go. Then the rest would rely on the website to serve the files. Like the GP2X one. (though in my IMHO it could do with an interface tweak or 3, search never works too well and there's that blank agreement you sometimes need to hit i accept for)
