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Re: Custom Debian Distributions



On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 02:57, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 11:22:24PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > So last year (well, early this year), Bdale came up with the idea of
> > "flavours", which unfortunately hasn't really gone anywhere yet. That idea
> > basically goes "If Debian is the Universal Operating System -- that is,
> > it can do everything you might want -- then doing any particular thing
> > is just a matter of choosing some subset of Debian packages". That is,
> > that custom CDs should just be a matter of saying "these are the packages
> > that non-profits want -- please grab them, then burn them onto a bootable
> > CD for me". No extra hacks, extra debs, or anything else -- they're all
> > included in Debian.
> 
> Speaking of labels... 
> 
> I don't know if I'd agree with the fact that it hasn't really gone
> anyway.
> 
> At Debconf in Oslo, we had a very productive meeting (or two) between
> folks representing the people working within Debian to create custom
> distributions. One of the things we agreed on was that the end of goal
> of pretty much all of our projects was to be able to do everything we
> wanted inside Debian in the way that Bdale described.
> 
> We also decided that flavors, subprojects, metadistros, and other
> projects who were interested in customizing Debian *from within* and
> that "Custom Debian Distribution" was the term we could all agree on
> and that we all thought was clear.
> 
> I think that work by groups like Skolelinux and others under the
> banner of creating custom distros has been inspired by and working
> toward Bdale's flavors. For reasons of sanity and the number of terms
> for the same thing already floating around for the same thing, it
> might never be called that. :)

I disagree - I think this is a great term, easily generic (and more
importantly understandable) enough to embrace the others. Glad to have
come across it. I think it is a useful distinction to unify references
to. That helps pool development/ creative efforts wrt infrastructure,
common marketing policies makes it easier for new sub projects, etc.

Debian Enterprise
- A Custom Debian Distribution

That's perfect!

> > The alternative is to look at Debian as a base, which has most of the
> > stuff you wantbut doesn't do everything quite right, and then build
> > derived distributions that fix the minor mistakes and fill in the missing
> > bits to make it exactly what you want. 
> > 
> > That does work now, and it's what Knoppix and a bunch of others do,
> > quite successfully.
> 
> I think we're going to end up on a hybrid situation when we need to do
> some of (b) because waiting for the infrasture (which we will have to
> help create of course) for (a) will take to long and we'd like to give
> people something to use in the meantime. :)

Perfection takes a little while to achieve, yes :)

Thanks to all,
Zen

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