Re: Smarter dpkg/apt rather than new distro ?
+++ Geoff Brimhall [04-02-24 22:37 -0800]:
> Been reading through the goals of emdebian, and the
> thought popped up that rather than create a whole new
> distro, make a smarter dpkg/apt which would strip the
> unwanted parts out of a *.deb, or divert them to the
> compact flash storage for use when needed.
>
> At intimate.handhelds.org, many,many packages from
> debian-arm can be used. Version 1.0.1 of opie is in
> debian unstable. Why not use what's there, but make
> the installer more intelligent - remove unwanted
> documentation/packaging info so it is conformant to
> ipkg.
What we are really creating is infrastructure, tools and policy - the distro
itself (possibly themselves) is really a side-effect of that.
Secondly, I'm not quite sure how the intimate/familiar split works these
days, but from talking to familiar people, they'd very much like a better
integration mechanism (with Debian) because a few people are struggling to
maintain a large number of packages. Maybe this isn't true of intimate, but
in general I think there is room, and indeed a need, for a better central
infrastructure upon which a multitude of different mini-distros can be
built.
So whilst we are of course making 'yet another distro', I sincerely hope
we're doing it in a way that will actually produce a set of meta-distro
tools and that this will reduce the amount of duplicated work, rather than
increase it.
But I could be wrong of course and I'm very interested in anything that
intimate people can bring to the discussion - what it your current build
process, and would better tools or integration with Debian help or are you
just fine thanx very much?
Wookey
--
Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679
work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
Reply to: