Re: Word of Emdebian at LinuxWorld Exp (London) ?
+++ Liberty Young [03-10-24 10:42 -0700]:
> Wookey, et. all:
>
> was wondering if you have any powerpoints, notes, papers, pictures! of
> your talk at LinuxWorld Expo?
I took a photo of Vince Sanders under our new poster and one of the Debian
stand. There are several other sets of pics of the stand by Debian people:
More significantly several of us sat down (with the welcome free beer and
munchies after day1) and thrashed out a plausible plan
for shrinking Debian, which keeping as much of the existing infrastructure
as possible. I need to write that up properly for the website as a matter of
urgency, but the short version (building on ideas from familiar and open
embedded) is:
We wanted to set up something that kept us in step with Debian and it's
package maintainance, whilst having small packages - anything that involves
re-packaging or maintaining separate rule sets is just going to get bit-rot
and go out of sync.
On the other hand we can't just change policy overnight and ask for
mini-versions of everything, so the scheme we worked out was to target a set
of basic packages that we need (most of 'base' is a good start) and persuade
the maintainers to add 'emdebian' targets to their rules files to build
mini-versions. Then we set up an alternate set of autobuilders to build the
emdebian versions.
We hope that this will produce a consistent set of smaller packages which
automatically keep in sync with Debian itself. This method also allows us to
have a simpler set of dependencies (e.g picking compile options that don't
need so many libraries installed). Assuming that it works then
we can see about how best to get the idea accepted as a more mainstream part
of Debian itself in due course.
To make this actually happen these things need to occur:
1) I write this up properly on the website
2) We indentify a set of packages we need
3) We write emdebian targets for those packages and persuade the maintainers
to put them in
4) We set up emdebian autobuilders for the arches we want to support (i386,
and arm we definately have enthusiasm for. powerpc? others?)
All this is about making debian suitable for small(er) devices, not tiny ones.
For the latter task emdebsys or similar makes a lot more sense.
Feedback on this scheme is very welcome. Volunteers even more so, as it's not
going to happen very fast (at all?) without a fair amount of effort.
Those present at the discussion were Me, Vince (Kylikki), Daniel Silverstone
(Kinnison) (very helpful to have an FTP-master there to tell you what is and
isn't going to happen :-), Paul Hedderly (who has volunteered build space),
Peter Naulls (chocky), and erm, someone else who's name I've forgotten - sorry!
Wookey
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