Re: Summary of the workshop on CDDs held in Valencia
>>>>> On Thu, 13 May 2004 15:15:24 +0200 (CEST), Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> said:
Andreas> On Wed, 12 May 2004, Free Ekanayaka wrote:
>> Last but not least, a preliminary collection of pictures of the
>> event can be viewed here:
>>
>> http://alvin.homelinux.net/bins2004/
Andreas> Nice. ;-)
Yeah, but it's missing you taking that icy bath.. we should ask maddog
for that ;)
>> Furthermore the presence of Richard Stallman from the Free
>> Software Foundation and Jon Hall from Linux International
>> contributed to the visibility of the event.
Andreas> I guess Jon would like to pronounced as Jon "maddog" Hall
Andreas> ... ;-) But this is not so important as perhaps RMS want
Andreas> you to pronounce the GNU in front of Linux. :)
Ooops. I thought it was kind of polite/respect not inserting the nick,
but I understand Jon may think the opposite :/
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Name: AGNULA/DeMuDi URL: http://www.agnula.org Attendants: Free
>> Ekanayaka Committee: Formerly funded by the European
>> Commission, now voluntary project economically supported by
>> Firenze Tecnologia [3] Target users: Musicians, researchers,
>> audio professionals
>>
>> Currently a semi-official CDD, in the sense that part of the
>> packages are already in Debian and a Debian Multimedia mailing
>> list exists. Free Ekanayaka is in the process to become a
>> Debian Developer and once he gets in he'll upload to Debian the
>> rest of his packages. Moreover he is closely following the
>> debian-custom mailing list, and working to improve the cdd-dev
>> package and make the A/DeMuDi meta packages compliant with the
>> emerging CDD guidelines.
Andreas> Time to upload the first meta packages. ;-)
Well, I'm eager to do that. But awfully I'm not a Debian maintainer
yet :/
Moreover I'm a little bit worried by the fact that the current
strategy adopted by the task packges (i.e. depending on a bunch of
other packages) is seen as a possible source of problems by some
people (see the recent post from Joey Hess on debian-edu).
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Speaker: Javier Vinuales When: May 7th, morning Slides:
>> http://www.miu-ft.org/~free/200405-valencia/adaptando_debian_a_sab=
>> ores_locales.pdf
>>
>> After a brief presentation of the Guadalinex project, Javier
>> introduced the issue of the Debian release system, which
>> currently makes difficult for a CDD to base its releases on
>> Debian stable.
>>
>> Then he described some possible modifications to the Debian
>> archive and release system, which are partly mentioned in
>> Andreas' document on the CDDs [5].
Andreas> I tried to adopt the (at least for me) main important
Andreas> idea of the different way for distributing Debian under
Andreas> Andreas> http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ch-todo.en.html#s-new_ways_of_distribution
Andreas> (Search for "testing_proposed_updated" for exactly
Andreas> Javier's suggestion and correct me if I did not
Andreas> understand him right.)
Well I think your explanation of the issue is quite clear. I'm not
sure of what is the next move now, whether to try to raise the issue
on debian-devel or to keep on collecting ideas till we have better
picture of the scene.
I'm Ccing this mail to Martin madkiss to see if there are any news
from the Debian Desktop team on this issue.
>> Then Sergio went into the question of the Debian
>> release/archiving system and the implications it has on some
>> important issues, as the need for LlureX to have deadlines and
>> independent releases, with the relative stable updates. He
>> analysed the possibility of maintaining an external
>> (i.e. non-Debian) APT repository as a temporary workaround,
>> waiting for better implementations of the Debian
>> release/archive system.
Andreas> IMHO the solution was given in Javier's talk or the URL I
Andreas> provided above. Please consider this seriousely. As
Andreas> well as Debian-Edu was the spin off for the new
Andreas> debian-installer I see no reason why CDDs should not be
Andreas> the driving force in finding a new way for distribution
Andreas> and enhancing the release cycle.
This does really make sense to me too :)
>> Here follows a not exhaustive list of the main issues which
>> emerged orthogonally in all talks and conversations and that
>> need further reports and discussion.
>>
>> o Debconf pre-feeding approach for customising packages
Andreas> Location for cf.engine scripts:
Andreas>
Andreas> http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ch-todo.en.html#s-EnhancingTechnology
Andreas thanks a lot for this neat summary. I think it really gets the
point. I would just add that cfengine (or ucf or whatever) could be
used not only to write an external configuration script for packages
which do not accept a certain patch, but even as a complement to
debconf.
In this view debconf would be used as frontend to ask questions and a
database to store/retrive answers, while cfengine would be used by the
postinst scripts as a sort of library to modify the configuration
files according to the deconf values.
I don't know whether this approach is correct or not, but currently
even the simple use of debconf as a database for configuration values
is not widely accepted.
For example see:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/02/msg00801.html [I've already posted this..]
and
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/04/msg01531.html
Maybe we should include these links in the document.
>> o Improvements to the current Debian archive/release system
Andreas> (see URL above)
>> o Easy creation of custom Live CDs and installers
Andreas>
Andreas> http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ch-todo.en.html#s-liveCD
>> As these are wide topics I'll let separate post to cover them.
Andreas> OK. I might add that an updated cdd-doc package just hit
Andreas> the archive and you are able to follow all the links I
Andreas> posted offline if you like or read it in the PDF inside
Andreas> ...
That's great. It's really important to keep this document up to date,
so that our discussions do not over when a workshop is over or when a
thread is dead.
cheers,
free
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