Re: thoughts on architectures
On Mon, Feb 11, 2002 at 01:12:28PM -0500, utsl@quic.net wrote:
> Having distributions for particular architectures wouldn't be required. All
> you need is stable, testing and sid. Makes dinstall's job easy. For CD sets,
> you pick a kernel, and pull a list of packages that are compatible with it.
> The same algorithm dselect or apt would be using.
I think I have not provided sufficient rationale about this point. The
reason I don't want to drop the concept of a distribution is mostly that: It
is not important at all that dinstalls job is easy. Quite the opposite, it
is important that what all people use is easy. And most people will use a
quite precisely defined architecture, and it would be a waste if everyone
would download the information about all packages just to dump most of it.
A plus point for your argument would be merging distributions, so if you
have two repositories, and some package from one distribution enables
packages in the other distribution that you could not install otherwise.
Then it is indeed an advantage. But for this type of application I suggest
that all tools for creating a pseudo distribution that is the virtual merge
of two or more distributions (or parts thereof) are available and not too
hard to use. We need such tools anyway for CD creators like Phil, mirror
admins and the archive maintainers themself need it probably, too.
I think having an additional stage that defines a distribution and cares
abouts its consistency helps modularity in the scheme, makes it for most
people much easier, and doesn't prevent to do anything fancy you would get
with not having it.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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