As far as I understand, the goal of GnomeOS is not so much to contribute to what seems to be an unofficial project of creating more linux distributions that there are actually linux users, but rather to make it easier to test and distribute Gnome applications. So, any Gnome user, can download and run any Gnome software regardless of the distribution he or she is running.
First, I really applaud you guys for actually acknowledging that software distribution is a problem on Linux, however, I don't believe a reference platform on its own will be enough. Think about this: 1. quite alot of software will have dependencies to libraries which doesn't really relate to Gnome. 2. some distributions might, or might not, provide those dependencies. 3. distributions still use different package managers. So, since GnomeOS is most likely not going to be an aggregation of every single package ever exististed, rather it is more likely to be, well the packages in Fedora. Do you think its going to be benificial to say "if it depends on something not in fedora, its not gnome compliant"? Im not entirely convinced that people will be happy, and/or follow adhere to this constraint. Please consider the following suggestion: * a set of libraries and applications which MUST be present on a "gnome compliant" system. A Gnome Standard Base if you will. I'm guessing this is sorta the idea behind GnomeOS as it is. * A distribution agnostic manual package installer, which primary goal is to distribute gnome applications and uses the dependency management of the distribution to deal with dependencies. If a dependency isn't available on platform XYZ, then it should be possible to download a installer (if one is available) and install that manually as well. Everything gets installed to /usr/local to avoid stepping on the feet of your distribution. Or something like that, basically, give us a way of installing software in a distribution independent manner. I know projects exists which aims to do this, but, for something like that to work, it needs to be implemented "everywhere". So, putting this directly inside gnome, would make that happen :) -Daniel
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