RE: Is there a VERY minimalist "Pure Blend"
Hello,
I was intrigued by the combination of "other forms of network management" and "VERY minimalist".
In your view, could there be a Pure Blend that only operates "inside" an existing intranet (for example in the European Parliament) and that is not intended to have individual human users in its primary form, but rather only services/servers?
If this question makes sense, please keep my two colleagues in cc if you want to answer.
If it does not, apologies for the noise.
//Erik
________________________________________
From: Jonas Smedegaard [dr@jones.dk]
Sent: Monday 24 November 2014 23:51
To: debian-blends@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Is there a VERY minimalist "Pure Blend"
Quoting Richard Owlett (2014-11-24 16:50:37)
> Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Quoting Richard Owlett (2014-11-23 15:42:32)
>>> My ideal system would have a kernel, Gnome2, apt-get/synaptic,
>>> SeaMonkey and not much else.
>> Do you ask as co-maintainer of such blend or as user of it?
>
> Primarily user. Initially I would use it as model to create something
> that meets my quite idiosyncratic (perhaps inconsistent) goals.
>
> Although one of my PERSONAL specifications is (with one possible
> exception) that all packages be straight from standard repository, I
> doubt my first few iterations wold pass muster as being Pure Blend.
Still sounds like an obvious Debian Pure Blend to me.
> Recommends would be disabled for apt/synaptic/etc.
Uhm - hope I can persuade you to change your mind about that. Not
because it makes it non-pure (it doesn't) but because it very very
likely to not really be what you want, and is very likely to create a
broken system (and is therefore not supported by Boxer).
I do understand you interest in fewest possible packages - but ignoring
recommends across the board is the wrong approach (it is a common
misunderstanding from an ancient bug in apt-get treating recommendations
as suggestions). Instead, inspect each recommendation and if certain it
does not apply to you then override specifically. More tedious, but The
Proper Way(tm) to keep the system minimal.
>> I would love to collaborate with you on developing such a blend, and
>> have already tagged pieces for various definitions of "minimalist" in
>> Boxer, the tool I would use for this.
>
> When I asked a similar question about a year ago, you mentioned Boxer.
> At the time I could not understand what relevance it had. Now a year
> later, when I searched for "Boxer" in this group the collection of
> links gave me a hint of what it is.
Boxer has been quite slow in the making. A year ago I was optimistic
that it was close to useful. That's my opinion now too, but with some
more weight: I now use Boxer to maintain two Debian Blends - DebianParl
and Debian Design.
>> Thanks for sharing what you find minimalist, I will take that into
>> account in my classifications (I would personally not consider GNOME
>> minimalist, so your input is appreciated).
>
> My definition more on the number of packages than on their footprint.
We have same mindset, it seems - I also strive to avoid bloat :-)
> No package will be installed unless I have an explicit use for it. The
> ramifications of that is why I suspect my initial iterations would not
> be acceptable as a Pure Blend.
On the contrary: That sounds *exactly* like it fits a Debian Pure Blend.
>> You wanna develop with me? As you've already demonstrated, that does
>> not require you to be a Debian developer, just for you to be
>> opinionated and (later) test if it works as expected. Then you can
>> team up with someone who can juggle the other needed parts (like me
>> or others on this list).
>>
>> If you are not in the mood for developing,
>
> Though not a "Developer" I do some "developing". I've several
> generation of a custom preseed.cfg that does some of what I want when
> used with Squeeze. It fails with Wheezy. I've an idea where the
> problem is, but need to do more work. I have also been pointed to
> debootstrap though further reading suggests that multistrap to be more
> appropriate.
Sounds good. I have found multistrap to be good for bootstrapping ARM
systems on a more powerful AMD64 development system. Not sure what
benefit you see in multistrap over (c)debootstrap - I guess it might
work fine also for simpler bootstrapping needs, but beware that due to
its (technically correct but) unusual way of doing its business it may
reveal subtle bugs that are difficult to report because package
maintainers may have a hard time repeating the issue (that was my
experience with an issue involving Apache2 configfile breakage).
Sounds like you are running Wheezy now.
Here is how you can try use
Boxer on Wheezy, to create a Wheezy or Jessie blend...:
I have attached a Boxer recipe for a Jessie blend with little more than
Iceweasel, Icedove, MATE and Synaptic. The recipe comes in two forms -
either feed the preseeding file to Debian-installer, or execute the
script on top of freshly created minimal Debian system.
Included is also the source for that recipe, in form of a YAML "node"
file for boxer. Here's how to get from node to recipes using a Wheezy
as development system (which it sounds like you are using now):
Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://debian.jones.dk/ wheezy boxer
Install boxer and some helper tools:
sudo apt-get install boxer git make shtool
Fetch and prepare boxer data:
git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/git/boxer/boxer-data
make -C boxer-data
Create your Blend node:
mkdir mydate
cat <<EOF >mydata/myblend.yml
classes:
- Desktop.environment.mate
- Desktop.email
- Desktop.web
- Framework.pkg.apt.gtk
EOF
Have Boxer generate recipe from node:
boxer compose --classdir boxer-data/jessie --datadir mydata myblend
(when Boxer and boxer-data packages matures, steps needed are reduced to
"apt-get install boxer; boxer compose datadir mydata myblend")
- Jonas
--
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
[x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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