Re: [school-discuss] projects

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 09:22:53AM -0400, LM wrote:
> I've been wanting to put my own collection together.

I can try and help you; have a peek at this bunch of images:
http://en.altlinux.org/Regular

In short, getting an ISO with anything that's already packaged
for ALT Linux (and there's a *lot* of software, educational too)
is usually a reasonable effort due to my pet project named
mkimage-profiles which allows to inherit and extend an existing
configuration making multiple image maintenance much easier.

> One thing I want to be able to do with this collection is let
> users be able to build all the programs that are part of the
> collection from the included source code.  I cannot tell you
> how many times I've downloaded the source code to a program and
> I've been unable to reproduce what the developer did.

There are two approaches:
- when you're warranting that the packages can be rebuilt;
- when you're providing source-based software management.

Both have their pros and cons, the former is preferable if the
rebuild is rather an exception and the latter if it's a routine
operation.

> Another thing I'm trying to do is make all these applications
> and libraries portable (which means I'm modifying the source
> code).

Guess NetBSD's pkgsrc is probably the most appropriate common
ground for efforts like that these days; I can refer you to one
of its developers I know (he also wrote NIH package manager).

> I've seen many portable apps collections turn programs into
> more portable renditions by using other outside software.  I
> wanted a more efficient strategy, so I'm actually going in and
> fixing the code so a program can do the job itself the way it's
> needed to.

It's in vain if you don't push your changes upstream,
unfortunately.  And that can be a pretty hefty effort either.

> I could certainly use help finding out information on the legal
> ramifications of distributing a collection like this.

The most prominent boring people lurk in debian-legal@, IMHO :)

> I'm trying to find out if I need to distribute a license for
> every program linked with a runtime library or whether the GNU
> compiler suite runtime exception covers it.

It does AFAICT so you can ship its license text with the
exception once for the collection and be on the safe side.

> I'm not even sure which runtime library to use on Linux yet.
> I've been considering using lsb or musl.

If you'd like to avoid glibc for any of the reasons then musl
seems to be quite alive these days according to my coworker
in the system programming dept.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/
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