Re: Proposal for new architecture support/distribution
On Mon, 1 Feb 1999 17:55:33 -0800, Oscar Levi wrote:
>> Secondly; I propose the beginnings of a Debian offshoot. Now, something
>> tells me that this will be met with a great deal of resistance (from the
>> people who brought you vrms.deb;), but I believe it may be in all of our
>> best interests, to further garner market approval and acceptance of Linux.
>
>No one is going to tell you that you can't do XZY with Debian...as
>long as you abide by the licenses. Making Debian more appealing and
>accessible to suit-wearers is a clear and positive intent. I don't
>see any reason for there to be an 'offshoot' project since there is
>nothing to leave behind. In other words, we can improve existing
>configuration management, add new architectures, and support
>commercial apps (as debs) without doing anything different than we
>already do. What's to resist?
Business debian? debian Server Edition?
It might be handy to have a subset of the distro with all the extras
stripped out. No games, no sound stuff, perhaps even keep all the X
software in a separate chunk so it can easily be selected or
deselected.
The main complaint I have seen from beginners about debian is: "What
is all this stuff in dselect? Do I need it all? What should I
install?"
This is getting better, but it would be nice to just be able to select
server and know you're getting a server.
It might even be good to allow dselect to accept package lists. These
might be available on the net, put together by the users. You'd pick
the list that seems to fit what you need, then during install there
would be an option to read in that list from floppy or something. Then
dselect would only install those things contained in the list.
It might even be useful for post-install troubleshooting. Say a new
user has some problem with something. The first thing you would tell
them to do is run dselect against "list XYZ" so that you would then
know they have the necessary packages installed.
You need to setup a uucp machine? Well, Joe Bloggs found that he could
strip out most of the distro and only leave certain necessary things.
The Bloggs UUCP Package List will give you an identical machine.
There are obvious problems with this since package names do change,
but I would imagine most of this could be taken care of. Is there an
"official" package name or identifier? So that sendmail, for instance,
is recognized no matter the version. Perhaps a keyword inside the
package saying |:sendmail MTA:| or something.
Stuart
--
Stuart Krivis stuart@krivis.com
[Team OS/2] [Team APK]
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