Planning: General Timelime

[Brian White <bcwhite@precidia.com>]

Just to keep things moving along...

Where do we go from here?  What other general guidelines should we discuss
up front to help us through the questions that will come up as we actually
start to build this?


For moving ahead, I think there are several steps we need to follow in order
to make it easy for contributors.  (Steps with the name number are ones that
I think can be done in parallel.)

1a) Find a repository for binary packages.  Who can host an access site?  I
    have a machine with a reasonably static IP address (i.e. DHCP but hasn't
    changed in over 6 months), but probably not enough disk space to host
    things once they really get going.  I don't think it's worth troubling
    the main Debian site until we have at least a base system running.

1b) Build "boot disks".  We need a Win32 program, perhaps just a .zip archive,
    that someone can install on their drive and then run "apt" to finish
    the installation.

2)  Create a build environment.  The first packages we need to be able to
    fetch and install are those that allow the building of more packages.
    This means dpkg-dev, perl, gcc, binutils, etc.  Other tools like wget,
    dupload, will also be needed.

3)  Port the most useful background tools: cron, amanda, etc.

4)  Port the most useful command-line tools: ssh, etc.

5)  Port everything else:  XFree, etc.

What do people think?  I have a working CygWin installation, but it compiles
for .exe extensions, which goes against our general guidelines (see below).

How about we start a list of what needs to be in the base archive...
 - cygwin library
 - passwd, groups
 - bash
 - perl-base
 - apt
 - ???


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Here is what has been loosely agreed upon.  Comments, suggestions, & changes
are still welcome.

Minimum System Requirements:
 - Pentium class with MMX technology (or compatible)
 - Windows 2000 or XP base operating system (Win95/98/ME/NT not supported)
 - 128MB of system RAM
 - 1GB of free disk space (may be reduced/increased with experience)
 - NTFS base filesystem

General Guidelines:
 - Match other Debian architectures as closely as possible, even at the
   expense of being different than the original CygWin distribution.

                                          Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@precidia.com )

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  Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy!"...  until you can find a rock.