Re: Progeny picax: Replacement for debian-cd
Raphael Hertzog wrote:
[ ccing debian-cd instead of -boot since that's the list mostly
concerned by this mail ]
Oops, sorry.
Le Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 02:51:21PM -0500, Jeff Licquia écrivait:
It's been brought to my attention that there's some dissatisfaction with
debian-cd within Debian, that some reengineering may need to happen, and
that such reengineering may not be able to happen soon.
Funny way to present the situation. :-) I indeed recognized problems with
debian-cd and I think it's time to rewrite partially debian-cd to
overcome the current limitations and get rid of the useless complexity.
For reference :
http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0401/msg00025.html
For the delay it depends either on my time or on volunteers coming up to
rewrite debian-cd following the new design that I have drafted :
http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2004/debian-cd-200401/msg00045.html
Unfortunately nobody contacted me yet to tell me he's interested in helping
out. :)
I'd be interested, except that I'm of the opinion that debian-cd's
design is flawed at a basic level, which was one of the motivations
behind picax.
Of course, I could very well be wrong; feel free to prove it. And I
wouldn't doubt that picax has some design flaws itself. But picax seems
to work better for Progeny's purposes.
source for each binary on it), or none. Package ordering is handled via
order files,
But it doesn't take into account dependencies. That's an important
feature of debian-cd in my opinion.
Picax does take dependencies into account. A raw order list is
generated from the various available sources (including the order file),
and then the order is dependency-sorted, with missing deps filled in as
needed.
The only place where this doesn't happen is with packages that don't end
up in the order list; when they are packed at all (which is optional),
they are packed in what amounts to a random order. This is a known
problem, and should be easy to fix.
In none of this do I wish to impugn the good name of Raphael Hertzog or
of his creation, which has served Debian well thus far. Nor do I wish
Thank you but I already received many critics for debian-cd and I never
felt offensed. After all debian-cd is working since slink (even if it
was not yet official at that time) and it has far outreached its initial
goal. But it suffers from other problems and now it's time to overcome
those problems if it must work for a few more releases. :-)
Great. And if that's what everyone wants, more power to you. But it
sounded like there was a dearth of people wanting to work on the current
version, so an alternative might be welcome.
I asked people on debian-cd to review picax and give feedback (on the
list and to you). Let's see what comes out !
Excellent. I shall await the results.
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