On Mon, 09 May 2005, Herman Robak wrote:
Most of the software packages don't have to track new
hardware. Even if it's old, it will still work. However,
the installer, the kernel and X will often simply not work
on newer hardware.
Could we agree on a small infrastructure, like the
installer, the kernel and X? And maybe a few more
libraries and daemons that communicate directly with
the hardware? "Base + drivers"?
This is an interesting idea. I think keeping up with hardware is an
important problem with the long release cycle.
Another is interoperability. The first example that comes to mind is
OpenOffice. It seems to be a thing that many people use backports of, I
know I do. I don't know when OpenOffice 2 will be out but (leaving aside
the JRE issues for a moment), it is a substantial improvement in
interoperability with Microsoft Office[1] and certainly won't ever be in
sarge. I imagine there will be others from time-to-time.
Would it be at all possible for a semi-official debian-edu/skolelinux
backports archive to exist for this? They needn't be on the install cd but
they would be a set of important upgrades which were regularly needed and
would not change often at all. Right now it would be nice to have OOo
1.1.4 for example. Given that there would only be a small number of
packages hand-picked by skolelinux/debian-edu developers, it might be more
feasible to ensure that upgrades worked for machines with the vanilla
system and those with a few extra backports. A few guidelines/rules could
be devised to stop the number of packages getting out of hand.