SEUL: It happened again (piece of junk mail server...)

[Micah Yoder <yoderm@geocities.com>]

Here are a few more messages I posted that got bounced.  I *think* the
problem is fixed now, but I may have a few more that will come back in
the next couple days.
-------------------------------------------

   Subject: 
            Re: SEUL: Re: What's the diff to SEUL ? (fwd)
      Date: 
            Sat, 17 Jan 1998 23:48:15 -0800
      From: 
            Micah Yoder <yoderm@geocities.com>
        To: 
            William T Wilson <fluffy@dunadan.com>
        CC: 
            seul-project@seul.org
References: 
            1


William T Wilson wrote:

> That's a good point.  Do we know how to unscramble compressed DOS drives?

Seems like just this week I saw mention of a project that was doing
compressed FAT/VFAT drives.  I hope it's true.

However, compression isn't used much now anyway.  I'm not sure if I've
*ever* heard of a Win95 drive being compressed.  NT certainly doesn't do
it.

------------------------------------------------
Subject: 
            Re: SEUL: Re: What's the diff to SEUL ?
      Date: 
            Sat, 17 Jan 1998 21:04:46 -0800
      From: 
            Micah Yoder <yoderm@geocities.com>
        To: 
            Bruce Perens <bruce@pixar.com>
        CC: 
            seul-project@seul.org
References: 
            1 , 2


Bruce Perens wrote:

> I think there's more than one spreadsheet being worked on. The scripting
> language would be Guile-GTK (as for most GNOME apps), so at least in theory

I'm not at all familiar with Guile.  How "end-user-friendly" is it?  A
lot of our converts will have probably used Excel (at least the office
ones) and may have dabbled in Visual Basic for Applications.  Will it be
as easy as that?  That needs to be the goal if we're going to attract
'Doze people.

Also, GTK, while quite good and getting better, isn't exactly the
easiest toolkit to use.  Of course, most macros don't need to do GUI
stuff....

------------------------------------------------------
Subject: 
            Re: SEUL: Re: What's the diff to SEUL ? (fwd)
      Date: 
            Sat, 17 Jan 1998 23:44:37 -0800
      From: 
            Micah Yoder <yoderm@geocities.com>
        To: 
            Rick Jones <rickya@siservices.net>
        CC: 
            seul-project@seul.org
References: 
            1 , 2


Rick Jones wrote:

> In my opinion we should stay as far from Windoze "look and feel" as
> possible.  People are using Linux, not Windoze, and I think they should
> experience an entire change.  I think it's possible to create an
> intuitive, attractive, interface without copying Windoze.

Agreed 100%!  It would be a disaster to look like a cheap Doze clone. 
We need something that both looks better and does more than the Doze
desktop!

But that alone won't get us very far.  The OS/2 Workplace Shell had Doze
beat by a mile (at least in functionality...maybe not in looks).

> > > Hmmm.  Would a DOS boot disk be possible ( using Caldera OpenDOS, of
> > > course) that would ask the user which drive would be used for Linux and

Actually FreeDOS.  OpenDOS isn't GPL is it???

--------------------------------------------------------

   Subject: 
            Re: SEUL: What's the diff to SEUL ?
      Date: 
            Sat, 17 Jan 1998 20:27:42 -0800
      From: 
            Micah Yoder <yoderm@geocities.com>
        To: 
            George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>
        CC: 
            seul-project@seul.org
References: 
            1


George Bonser wrote:

> An important thing is that if this is to be the basis for commercial Linux
> distributions, we can not sell Qt and it should not be in the core
> distribution that others would be expected to sell in the future. It

Yeah...the CORE should definitely be 100% GPL.

> True but you can not SELL Qt.  They are not clear enough.  What if I have
> a $400 linux distribution like Caldera OpenLinux-Standard? What if the
> default desktop and the admin tools all require Qt and I ship it with the
> Distro. It becomes a grey area and I really do not feel like being hauled
> into court, I have enough to keep me busy already.

I think it was clear enough that Qt can be used in ANY GPL application,
and distributed freely with such, as long as the source was included. 
That means you can sell it for $1,000.  But as long as everything on the
CD is GPL and includes the source, that's fine.

Now if we had a non-GPL desktop that depended on Qt, that would be a
different story.

> My biggest beef is the nature of its per-programmer/per-platform
> mumbo-jumbo.  You have to buy a license for each programmer that can touch
> the source tree. It is not a per-processor license or a concurrent
> programmer license.  You buy a license for each programmer even if they
> are not actively working on the source at the moment.  If we had a
> distributed project with 10 people that could work in the source tree, you
> need to buy 10 licenses even if only two people are working at any one
> time.

Yeah, well, as free software writers, that really doesn't affect us.

> Fine but as I said, I really do not think KDE can be the default. It can
> be an add-on but we can not count on using it for our "look and feel".

For SEUL there really should be only one "look and feel".  We want a
reasonable amount of consistency.  I don't think we want people to be
switching window managers.  If they're into that, they need RedHat or
Debian.  If I ever got my grandma to use SEUL, she wouldn't be changing
window managers.

> Sure, we can put all that stuff in non-free and the users can have a ball
> with it.  We would not distribute it with "Official SEUL CD's" but the
> users could connect to the site and grab what they want via FTP.

That's where I don't really agree.  As I said, as long as everything
that uses Qt is GPL, there is *NO* problem with including it on the CD! 
Why should we make them waste time downloading something that we could
include?

We might want to ask someone at Troll to clarify this, but I'm about 99%
sure this is correct.  If I'm wrong (and the possibility of that
exists), then I take back everything I said about Qt.

Besides, we'll probably have to include other non-GPL stuff
anyway...such as the JDK (unless Kaffe will work right by then...)

> And THAT is the strength of dselect over glint.  I can connect to the
> site, get a menu of what is available, pull the packages and they install.
> Maybe someone could write a Tk/Tcl front-end?  All dselect is, is a
> menuing system and front end for dpkg and dpkg-ftp.

That would be sweet.  I actually had an idea sort of like that once but
wasn't aware that Debian did it.

My idea was to have a program ask the user what he/she wants (as in
program catagories or whatever).  It would then connect to
software.seul.org or whatever and download the latest list.  It would
automatically match the system requirements of the software to the
user's system and only show the programs that would work.  When the user
downloaded something, it would automatically be installed, as specified
in a SEUL-install file or something.  Is that about what dselect is?

Sorry, I'm not very familiar with Debian.  But I intend to get a 6.4gig
HD to add to my 4gig pretty soon.  2gigs will go to OS/2, 2gigs to a
shared/spare EXT2 partition, and 2 one-gig partitions for trying
different Linux distributions.  I think Debian will be the first I try
on it.


-- 
"win95 n. 32 bit extensions for a 16 bit
patch to an 8 bit operating system originally
coded for a 4 bit microprocessor by a 2 bit
company that can't handle 1 bit of competition."