[seul-edu] Re: ISO project--a different approach

[Michael Shigorin <mike@osdn.org.ua>]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 01:48:16PM -0400, Doug Loss wrote:
> I'd be happy to have Debian Jr or DebianEdu take what we
> develop and bundle it into their work, but we're committed to
> being distro-neutral, which probably also means
> packaging-system-agnostic.

I believe the very first thing we're committed to now are
families and jobs (even if the latter deal exactly with free
software), and if something makes no joy and/or profit, there is
usually little enthusiasm.

So when participating in a vivid project generaly *can* make at
least joy, reimplementing the wheel from scratch generally
doesn't.  The package management question is just that -- you can
have almost no pain with accurately written software when
packaging at least RPMs (no DEBs on me but debian/rules seem to
be quite similar by time spent?) -- but messing with "neutral"
tarballs *is* a pain whatever you do.

> I'd like to see everything we package be in both RPM and DEB
> format, so that anyone with a previous install of Linux can
> download our ISO, burn a CD-ROM, and install selected packages
> from it easily.  If that requires two installers, fine, but if
> there's a nice app that will serve everything I'll be happy to
> use it.

So probably the "installer" part could be generally skipped if:

- some already available are quite fitting;
- we concentrate on package repositories which could be relied
  upon as a fresh edu software source (just like FM as a
  "general" catalogue or say SAL for sci).

Then the problem is transformed from the original one of de facto
creating *and* maintaining distribution (with quite critical
things like Apache for web apps which have no relation to the
project's goals, but somehow are depended upon -- heck, stable
and featureful kernel *is* a problem!)...

...into far lighter problemS which can be taken by far more
people.

For example, we at ALT Linux do have some quantity of packages
regarding education, and I believe would be willing to share the
specs and experiences.  If you manage to host a "resync" between
distros which seem to be acceptable as a base -- everyone will be
better off hacking on *edu* software than figuring out what went
wrong with custom installer at a remote location...

---

Please don't take me as devastating -- my message is just that
here and now, there aren't enough resources to handle the _whole_
distro it seems (our team is 100+ now with ~20 fulltimers, and
it's not too much I must confess).  But probably enough to
provide "consulting" like Phase 1 evaluations, and to support
each one's beloved distro(s) at real locations -- with those
well-formed packages to rely upon.

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

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