Hello Enrico, I did read with interest the informations about Briegel, and the oss-qm idea. I also looked into the PDF.
I like the argumentation and the overall idea of such a repository. Maybe it will work. I fear there are some drawbacks. In my estimation you can compare patches to closed sources to some degree. Even if they are pro forma open source they are mainly usefull for the very distribution. In this sense they are the propriatary work and the capital of each distro. So I guess it will be difficult to convince them to store their patches into a common QM repository. Forks of a distro would become much more easy and like more successful. However it's worth I try. OpenSource works and nobody would have predicted that 40 years ago. > You never really needed Java, but proper build systems. What we > could gain here is saving a lot of distro-specific extra works if > some distro like Gentoo directly works on different targets > environments. That's true as far as we speak of unixoid environments. To port programs to other environments requires more efforts than just a proper build system. The original idea of Java was, to bring a standard layer into any environment, that would remove the need of ports. > The interesting point in Java is that it is an (well, was) an > very cleanly defined virtual machine (even virtual processor) One interesting point is, that it is was very successfull, but on completly different fields than origninally targeted. Most Java doesn't run platform independent programs, but runs servers, that don't need to be platform independent at all. > environment which can be emulated on virtually any known machine > (assuming it has enough resources). That could also work with > plain C, if the basic APIs are stricly and cleanly defined. > (see Plan9 vs. plan9port). Java was also designed to facilitate programming comparing C. Still Java itself isn't the last clue. Take the horrible way to copy a simple array. The fewer programming in C facilitates matters. It still makes sense in the Unix environment, but rather for historical dependencies and performance than for simplicity. > > Let me add a third candidate: Briegel. It's based on crosscompiling > from ground up. It's not really a distro, but more a generic build > system, as a basic building block for distro generation. But beware > that it's based on very different concepts than traditional distro > build systems. That is very interesing. Briegel is indeed related to what I currently do. I have a special usecase in mind. I only want to do the basics as far as necessary, because a portable Posix environment is still missing yet, then turn back to my original idea. Briegel is strongly focused on the technolgical basics, without talking of all possible usecases. At least mine was not addressed. :-) Still Briegel looks like a one-man-show while there are already communities behind the Cygwin and the Gentoo candidate. What is your strategia to build up a community? Al
