Re: Debian and DeMuDi
Marco Ghirlanda say ciao to everybody.
Hi all,
I'm new to this list, even though some of the people here
may already know me, as I'm one of the developers of the
AGNULA/DeMuDi distribution [0].
Yesterday Andrea Glorioso, Martin Michlmayr and me met in Florence
and talked about how to "merge" DeMuDi with Debian.
Leaving aside the technical issues for a moment, we all agreed
that we should push towards an integration of all audio related
project based on Debian, and that everything should be ideally
done under the hat of Debian Multimedia.
I do agree completely. Doing everything under the hat of Debian
Multimedia seems to me a sort of "no other way" choice. If we want
really to cooperate on Linux and Multi Media Debian is the distribution
of choice for the strong presence of a community feeling wich is the
most important glue of such projects.
As far as DeMuDi is concerned we have always tried to be as close
as possible to Debian in terms of packaging, respecting the Debian
policy and, recently, building our newly packaged applications
against sid snapshots [1] via a regular buildd/wanna-build/sbuild
environment, so that it should not be too painful to upload
everything we did into Debian.
I think the main issue that we will have to address is licensing and
copyright problems related to "not so sure if it is legal to distribute"
software. I think that one of the main advantage of keeping the things
in the Debian way is that we can be quite sure that if a package is in
main it will not infrange anything and we can of course contribute to
the Multi Media section of the tree with relevant softwares, tested and
configured FOR DEBIAN (sorry for screaming it). Many distributions had
and are giving away uncertain packages and configured for their own
environment. Debian lacks a lot in terms of multi media easy setup in
comparison to very small and still very innovative projects, like
DyneBolic, Knoppix derived distro (included ours Medialinux) and fedora
like derivatives. On such distributions it is much more easy for a
normal user to set up a fully working multi media system.
Martin suggested us to be even more closed to Debian, and to make
sure that our packages are always aligned with the unstable/testing
environemnt, and, having well written build dependencies, this
should not be to difficult to achieve, as it would be just a
matter of possibly rebuild a package.
That is exactly what it should be done, IMHO.
Furthermore from now on DeMuDi should always stick to the Debian
version of the JACK library, using the same libjackX.Y.Z-dev package
to build packages.
I will like to address the need for full support of vloopback and his
splitter to achieve similar virtual patches between video applications
(also if I know that with video there are many problems involved).
Most probably DeMuDi will release [2] more often than Debian, and
there could be little differences in the system configuration and
set up, but we are going to do hardly everything through task
packages, which either feed the debconf database with some DeMuDi
specific values or use cfengine, as Skolelinux already does.
I met this summer in Oslo some of the Developers of Skolelinux wich were
so kind to show me an alumni class filled with terminal computers with
Skolelinux installed and a practical demonstration of a working
prototype of the Debian installer wich was really autoconfiguring
everything (on their machine, at least), without nearly any user input,
except for password, machine name etc. That is the direction to go:
fully user friendly environment with the same capacity of deep
configuring present in Debian. The two things don't go really in the
same directions but if we want people to use Demudi, or Medialinux, or
Agnula OR Debian...
We are now starting to contact other Debian based audio/multimedia
projects, as Medialinux [3], and we hope to convey all the
existing efforts towards a single direction.
That's what we will try to do ;-) Strongly.
Ciao all, Marco Ghirlanda
Reply to: