The Debian TDeb draft specification is now available: http://people.debian.org/~codehelp/tdeb/ Debian TDebs are progressing and a few changes will be filtering into Emdebian TDebs. First, we will have two forms of TDebs - TDebs for Emdebian Grip that are to be more closely related to Debian TDebs because of some of the features of Debian TDebs. This change will be done as a transition - Emdebian Grip will start with the current Emdebian TDebs and migrate to a slightly different solution based on Debian TDebs once support becomes available in Debian testing (Squeeze). This transition will be transparent as far as installations are concerned, with the possible exception that installations of Emdebian Grip will have slightly more translations installed after the transition (e.g. pt_BR as well as pt). Emdebian Crush will stick with the current Emdebian TDebs (because Crush is built/cross-built, not repacked). It gets a bit complex but this is the flow: 1. Until the proposed changes are available in dpkg in Debian testing, things stay as they are - Grip and Crush use the same TDebs. 2. There are inherent problems with sharing TDebs across different distributions with different package requirements, hence Grip will migrate to a derivative of Debian TDebs as that support becomes available. 3. Once support is available, Emdebian Grip will migrate to architecture-independent TDebs, using the support in the Debian TDeb file format to split out Emdebian Grip TDebs on a per-locale-root basis. This maintains a closer link with Debian whilst making the most of the inherent power of the new Debian TDeb file format and acting as a testing ground for the development of tools within Debian that will be able to handle Debian TDebs in Debian. 4. The experimental TDeb source package created by em_installtdeb will disappear - a separate wrapper will be made to support translation modes, within Debian. 5. Emdebian Grip will migrate to having all translations for supported locale roots - Crush will remain with translations only for supported locales. This means that Grip will gain pt as well as pt_BR even if only pt_BR is selected, etc. This is a consequence of the switch to the Debian TDeb format and is not expected to add any significant amounts of data. It will add significant improvements in the processing of Emdebian Grip itself. 6. Debian TDebs will still be stripped of documentation (translated and untranslated) as well as translated manpages during the process of conversion to Emdebian Grip. 7. Overall, the two setups will provide testing grounds for a variety of tools that will find uses in Debian after the release of Debian Squeeze. It's just that Emdebian will have them first, for once. Finally, the delays in releasing Lenny mean that I am expecting to make an Emdebian Grip release alongside Lenny, as well as Emdebian Crush for ARM. I do not expect to have sufficient time to add any more architectures to Crush before Lenny but Grip is infinitely easier to provide and I expect to be able to provide arm, armel, i386, amd64, powerpc, mips and mipsel. (Grip architectures must exist in Debian before being available in Grip, so uClibc support is quite a long way away, mipsen might not be attainable). Grip for amd64 exists for test purposes mainly and because it is trivial to add and test it. Emdebian Grip (based on Debian 5.0 "Lenny") will, necessarily, release with the same TDebs as Emdebian Crush. If that isn't clear, let me know. ;-) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
Attachment:
pgpt3k_IP00zF.pgp
Description: PGP signature