On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 8:50 PM, USM Bish <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Sriram Narayanan <[email protected]> wrote: >> I want to propose that we move to rpm5 to give the user the >> following usage experience: >> [...]>> > > I really do not know, if you really need a "binary package" > based approach. The issue is the variability of hardware use > here. I have nothing against "rpm" or "dpkg" based approach, > but then, at the end of the day, Belenix would become "Yet > Another Distro" ! Since the userland s/w is same for all *nix > based OSs, nobody would appreciate the difference. > > I found nothing wrong with the "specs" based system which > Moinak had used for the initial belenix development. This can > be easily extended to a source based distribution system. My > preference would always be for a source based technology, > rather than pre-compiled binary downloads. Anything compiled > on your box always works ! >
Yes a Gentoo like source based system appears nice and is attractive to a bunch of people. However from my experience most (me included) do not want their desktops/laptops doing long-running builds the moment they try to install a package. It becomes a worst-case scenario when you are doing a full upgrade, or when you are trying to install big software bundles like say Koffice, Firefox etc. Your laptop can potentially spend a week compiling stuff, if you can keep it continuously on for that long without overheating or battery draining if you are on the move. At the risk of starting a controversy: How popular is Gentoo today ? In addition we plan to work with one standard codebase maintained by the common community. Better cooperation and sharing of effort. It is simply impossible for a few folks working on BeleniX to maintain a parallel build system and parallel source base and stacks of thousands of FOSS. Rather than fragmenting efforts we stand to gain by cooperating in a single OpenIndiana community. In addition the so called consolidations or multiple source bases from which a typical OpenSolaris distro is built are diverse with divergent build systems. It is quite a task to cohesively orchestrate among these diverse systems. Having said this we definitely want source build to be a reality for those who want to experiment. It may even be an excellent way to build and install Multimedia related software with machine specific optimizations. Having a source build install is also related to a future effort within the OpenIndiana community to unify build systems to a common system, logically spec files as of now. > Please study the *BSD ports systems. it would be the easiest > to implement on existing "specs" platform. It would also > reduce server requirements for storing various versions of > binaries. > Yes ports handles additional layered software, not the core system. Disk space goes cheaper and cheaper so storage is not an issue :) Usability and end-experience are primary motives here. > For those, who have not used FreeBSD/ OpenBSD etc, "port" is > a technology used to install from source. Each Port is > a collection of scripts that when executed, automatically > download source of softwares from the Internet, patches, > configures if necessary, compiles and install it. Any > dependencies on other applications or libraries a port may > have are also installed for the user. > > Like binary packages and ports understand dependencies. > Suppose you want to install an application that depends > on a specific library being installed, the ports system > automatically installs the library first. > > Each port, or software package, is maintained by a “port > maintainer”, an individual who is responsible for staying > current with the latest software developments. Anyone is > welcome to become a port maintainer by contributing their > favourite piece of software to the collection. One may also > choose to adopt and maintain an existing port that has no > maintainer-ship. > > This brings in better contribution and participation from the > community. You would notice, binary "packages" are invariably > the handiwork of a core group, thus creating an artificial > divisions of "developers" and "users". > The same binary packages are built from spec files or maybe makefiles, however each package gets an identified maintainer to avoid any artificial divisions. Fedora does it that way and distributes binary packages. The OpenIndiana folks are already working to standardize processes in this regard. > Having things this way, would reduce the work of the core > group at developing a base install with minimal X with a full > gcc based development environment and networking support. The > "base" distro would be smaller, and "meaner", but more solid. > This is possible even with binary packages if the right level of package granularity is maintained. In the OpenSolaris world there are bigger issues than source vs binary packaging that makes a mini distro more challenging that it should be. One of those is the big monolothic packages that come out of the core OS build. > Now that Oracle has pulled the plug on OpenSolaris, a larger > community support is needed if any fork of the old OpenSolaris > base is to continue. > Yes, this is already happening around Illumos and OpenIndiana efforts and we should gather around those and contribute to the common goal. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ belenix-discuss mailing list http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-discuss http://groups.google.com/group/belenix-discuss
