The state of UNIX in general and PLD in particular

[Cezary Krzyzanowski]

Dnia 04-03-2007, nie o godzinie 19:30 +0100, Jakub Piotr Cłapa
napisał(a):

> Of course there are such apps (I mentioned them as an example). Kernel 
> modules (especially on Linux, where almost everything comes with the 
> mainline kernel) are quite rare and may require some special treatment.

But not only kernel-related apps. Think apache, or any other very heavy
used daemon. We give some apps special treatment, like named, which
comes jailed by default. Some other distros might prefer to choose one
security pattern (jail, chroot, vserver) and bundle their apps in a
different way then the original shipped app. Linux is made for such
cases + PLD is made to tripple or even quaderlupe the amount of packages
dividing every app to 1mln subapps to fit every configuration need. By
bundling we kill our main philosophy (think FHS also). 

> There are several main environments and the idea is that their 
> dependencies are rather not interconnected. This could be measured and 
> would certainly had to be if we were going to build something like that. 
> (the usage statistics mentioned as a SoC project could help here)

This is true like hell, but in desktop environments, like Ubuntu (which
was AFAIR the system of choice by the papers authors). We aim at server
environments, where shared /usr from lvm or raid is the core of
clusters. We don't aim for Normal User (NU) and his ease in application
installations.

Other thing is that poldek is quite easy to handle and a good GUI with
ratings would solve most of 'our' desktops problems.

Nevertheless the alternative and ease is tempting. IF one could think of
a way to ease and automate keeping two distro types (desktop and
server), so that developers don't have to maintain two sets of 15k
SPECS, this is an alternative to think of.

> Which ones?

Think gajim, think azureus, think Scribus. Think almost all non-GNOME
GTK app (firefox), Opera. Think vim, emacs, eclipse. Damn man - Linux is
made by freedom of choice, not bundling IE + explorer together and tell
the user "Use bundle 1 or bundle 2".

> If the XML lib is used by only several app that lets bundle it with the 
> apps (very little disk space will be lost this way).
> If the XML lib is used by many GNOME apps than bundle it with the GNOME 
> superpackage.
> If it's used by more than 100 programs from different environments (say 
> DBus) than put it in a general desktop bundle.

True. But how to handle two lines of SPECS - bundling desktop ones, and
server ones.

> The reused translations are the core GTK ones, aren't they? I don't 
> remember any translations with their own package that is required by 
> other apps.

Well - GTK provides some default widgets and behaviors like 'Open' or
file dialogs. But I agree - this is minority. 

> You've shown 2 examples and say that we need 5 distros. Divide the core 
> into "core" and "desktop". Getting a little more than needed is not 
> certainly a big problem. 

The power of PLD is flexibility - You can build anything custom out of
it anyway You want. Building an desktop distro is one idea. Maybe it
could be done in some variant of the way showed in the paper, but this
is only an idea. There are some other projects, which take PLD as base
and use it's flexibility to change a little bit - think rescue CD, think
livecd - which have some dirs static (ro).

But there are tons of ideas to build a distro. My question is, why
change a flexible distro into desktop-only mode. If You think of doing
some fork, or branch more user-friendly - GREAT! This is something I'd
really want to see and maybe use on my laptop. If You think You're up to
it, or You have some idea how to automate maintaining two branches - OK.
But IMO let's stay with the old flexible, divided like hell to tiny
pieces PLD, because our target *is* servers and admins, not desktop.

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