Everything that follows is inspired by or lifted directly from conversations with Skolelinux folks like pere. On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 02:38:38PM +0100, Javier Fern?ndez-Sanguino Pe?a wrote: > Knoppix (or Knoppix-derived versions) provide three things: <snip> > 3- preconfiguration of all the software and customisation for a specific > need. <snip> > The (3) part is not something that debian-desktop will do since it > boils down to modifying, at leisure, the system's configuration > (/etc directly, since there is not a single point of configuration, > debconf is not an option here). I'm not sure you can speak so categorically about this. Skolelinux has, in some ways AUIU, gone this route already. What we *can* do is find the ways that we, as a custom distribution, want to change the configuration files of other packages and then submit wishlist bugs with patches adding low-priority debconf questions with defaults set to the current behavior. Now the package need never even *ask* those questions! Now, when someone does a Custom Distro installation, they'll have a CD that is vanilla Debian plus some presets to fill the Debconf database with the values you want for your new debconf questions. > It's also something that cannot be 'packaged' easily (there are as many > possible setups as users out there), and usually this packaging violates > policy (since the package would modify other packages configuration > files). This is the beauty of the method above. I'm sure there are limitations on this model but if we follow this sort of plan, it's not difficult to imagine a time in the very near future when every Custom distribution is pure Debian plus a single policy non-compliant package and the goal of every custom distro to reduce that the size of the package to zero. :) Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill mako@debian.org http://mako.yukidoke.org/
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