On Wed, Apr 29, 1998 at 08:05:00PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote: > I've been giving serious thought for a while to forming a new Linux > distribution. My reason is to fulfill some goals that currently are > not addressed by Debian or the commercial distributions.
Certainly no distribution can meet the needs of everybody. Debian seems to be the best distribution on technical merit, but it seems to be missing some things from the easy-to-use standpoint. I was thinking about building an unofficial set of installation scripts and the like for Debian to make it easier on a new user but still show some of the power in Linux in general.. My plan was to make a console-only thing that could really install to a < 100 meg partition (I'm aiming high and trying to get it in 40 or less) and have it be compatible with Debian enough that you could later show dpkg the main Debian mirrors and have it act like it was a normal installation, if perhaps a little nonstandard as to what was installed and what wasn't, and it should be able to integrate itself with no fuss. Thought even that some of the Debian maintainers might be interested in some of the resulting scripts if they were very useful at all. > I've posted my first message on this topic to debian-devel, as I think > a lot of you have similar goals to the ones below, and those who do have > earned the right to be in on the project from the start. I don't currently > have a mailing list for this project - I guess I'll have to start one. I'm not a programmer. I just know what's easy to work with and what's not. I can build a package but am currently doing much of it by hand since I don't yet understand the workings of debhelper. I'll RTFM later and maybe learn how to use it. => You want rpm though. =p I personally think rpm is nasty when you consider that a friend of mine (a newbie) tried to install bitchx today and found that she didn't have libcurses.so.4. Yeah, that she didn't have the FILE. No clues where to get it. No hint as to the package. For libcurses that's a no brainer, but what about some of the less known libs? dpkg would have told her what package and what version she needed. Using apt she could quite easily just run apt-get install <package> and it would. Some packages like pine and qmail are worth the fact that to make them useful they must be in source packages. We ALL (all of us who thought pine was an important package at all) agreed on that. And you wouldn't get me away from qmail--so don't try. => The older version of ncftp is now GPL, but what of the new version? Would you say there's no need to use that because it was not OpenSource? Not everything is OpenSource and not everything needs to be, really. When OpenSource versions of similar programs appear, that's fine. But until they do, you'll be crippling yourself by not using what's there. Some of them are quite free despite not being quite free enough. With the exception of rpm in place of dpkg, there is very little you want to do with this planned dist that Debian doesn't already in terms of techincal forms.. Debian is not the most user-friendly dist, but that could chanage with a few custom scripts and possibly a few rebuilt packages using different conffiles.
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