On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Sergio Talens-Oliag wrote:
Well, I have the feeling that the problem is, as Enrico said, that everybody is quite busy and a lot of projects were already in development when you started to work on the cdd package and now maybe they don't feel like changing.
I'm happy that those peoples are not so busy that they reinvented Debian and don't feel like changing. But I'm not sure about whether many people outside (=not on this list) there do so and spend their time in inventing wheels because they are to busy to take the existing ones. To help those people we started CDD and I guess people who are at this point reading this mail have experience enouth in informatics to agree that spending time once to settle down to a standard saves an order of magnitude of time more in the future.
Hmm., now it is too soon, but when I get to this part we can talk about it. I'm also interested on user menus and roles, but we are solving it for a different environment (GNOME Menus Only) and we are solving it now at installation time (putting files in /etc/skel and adding system menus), anyway I would love to have a general solution, I'll think about it when a lot of other things are finished ... ;)
For the moment it is enough to convince Gnome people that user menus are a feature we want (except if the want us to switch to KDE which works perfectly with usre menus).
OK, I'll try to, maybe we should send a call for cooperation to all the people interested on CDD, I thought this list was the one, but maybe I have to post to debian-devel and all the current custom distributions lists... I'll do it tonight.
I kept Petter in one of my mails in CC to remind him taht something interesting is going on...
Well, I don't have strong feelings about it, it's simply I have the feeling that it is cleaner to put all the things related to a task together, and once the layout is clear and documented a migration should be a matter of minutes ;)
... which is why I personally offered to migrate not only one but two CDDs in case the switch makes sense and is accepted by others.
The beauty of the directory layout is probably not enough to convince busy people - but it depends from your talent in discussing (or perhaps offering them some free Spanish wine at the nect conference in Spain - in the later case I want to be convinced as well. ;-) )
Well, maybe on the next meeting that could be arranged... ;)
BTW, any idea where and when the next Open Source World Conference would take place?
Well, again I don't have strong feelings, but I believe that a structure like:
cdd/ task1/ package-selections/ debconf-pressed/ installer-pressed/ postconf-scripts/
Makes working on a task cleaner and more extensible: the idea is that each file inside a directory can be handled by different people, something that is very interesting (and I plan to use) for preseeds and postconfig scripts, mainly because they can be logically related to a single package or a small set of packages.
As I said I agree with you in case it is accepted by others. I see no reason to change if others stay silent (= ignore your suggestion).
Hmmm, I do not really see the advantage to use these files *in source*. While I would havo no trouble with this I do not see the advantage.
First I have to say that with source package I mean the distribution of a .deb that contains the task directories as I've described before.
To make it clear to me: I understand you this way that you want to create a binary Debian package which contains all necessary files to create the binary Debian packages of a CDD (inclusively this package itself which causes probably a recursion problem ;-) ). Is this right? If yes, I see no reason in building Debian packages in a different way than from its source package. But may be I missunderstood you.
Distributing the CDD in this way allows anyone to generate a CDD repository or installation CD using sarge, sid or whatever mix he wants to, without introducing dependencies into the main Debian archive.
Of course if you want to include metapackages into the archive you can do it, but that's only for convenience and is probably easier to generate the metapackages localy and put them on people.d.o or alioth.d.o for the different debian releases.
You can also do this from the meta packages source with the current system by just pointing /etc/cdd/sources.list to the right sources.list file. Did I missed something?
The only problem which I did not solved by myself is, that you can have different resulting binary packages for the same source when changing /etc/cdd/sources.list on the building machine. Because this sucks we have to find a clever solution here.
Kind regards
Andreas.
-- http://fam-tille.de
