Re: SEUL: What's the diff to SEUL ?

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On Thu, 15 Jan 1998, Erik Walthinsen wrote:

> > Debian provides a complete distribution but it is also designed from the
> > start to be used as the core of other distributions.
> That may be, but how many distribs have to seen based on it?  I haven't seen 
> any.  Part of this is because of something someone mentioned a couple days 
> ago: Currently, if you start from Debian, you get the whole enchilada.  If 
> you strip it down and build what you want on top of it, you lose the benefits 
> of starting from Debian, namely the compatibility.

You must remember that Debian is barely a year old in official release. It
is only at 1.3 now. The install base fits on 5 floppies. THAT is the basis
that you should be working from.  If you buy a Debian CD, you do NOT get
non-free.  When you first run dselect you are NOT required to install the
pre-selected packages ... only the ones in "Required". Others are
preselected only as a suggestion to make a useable distribution.  All you
have to do is cursor to the package in dselect and hit "-" to unselect it.

> 
> What I want to do is *specifically* define such a core.  It may be 
> multi-layered, or semi-modular (i.e. you could exclude the XFree core 
> components if you just want to build a server distrib), but it will be 
> *standard*.  This allows distributions to form around a Debian base without 
> sacrificing compatibility.

I suggest starting with the debian base ... NOT debian main.  Debian is
broken into three main sections ... main, non-free, contrib.  Each of
these is broken into subsections.  Main has base, admin, etc.  THe 5
diskettes have main/base on them.  Within each subsection are further
breakdowns of Required, Optional, and Extra.  It is like the unix
filesystem, it scales nicely :)  You are free to add additional
subsections.

Also, you are free to modify what appears pre-selected the first time that
dselect is run by editing the status file in /var/lib/dpkg.


> 
> The core would be maintained and versioned as a whole, making upgrades for 
> "child" distributions almost trivial.  In the long run, if the most popular 
> distribs (either todays' or tomorrows') are based on this core, both GPL'd 
> and commercial projects can release *one* package, and it will work on all 
> core-compliant Linux distribs.  *That* is my goal.

That is rather easy with debian, you simply add subsections.  Also, have
you looked at the 86Open project? This is for one standard binary and
packaging format for all intel *nix operating systems and the cast of
players includes Caldera, Red Hat, Debian, Sun Solaris, SCO, FreeBSD,
NetBSD.  The current glibc effort is the first step in that project.

> > Qt is the sticking point.
> That's why I had to tell a member of the KDE project that SEUL could *not* 
> use KDE as its environment.  Qt just doesn't have a very friendly license.

Qt limits you to completely free software or very expensive software, no
developing of inexpensive shareware (a la XV) between a group of
programmers on the net is possible with the current license from Troll
Tech without a rather large grant of money.


George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.