On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 11:35:47PM +0200, Robert Wallner wrote: > On 10/3/05, Yedidyah Bar-David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Also, Having a web site that its front page > > says "Not Found, The requested resource was not found." isn't very > > encouraging. > > It's an 404 error page.That was left there intentionally, to leave spiders > and friends out. It can't be called yet a website, so it will be > embarrassing to have lousy pages indexed on the web. It will be replaced > once someone will have something interesting to write there.
OK. Makes sense. > > Debian also does what you described above - think about stability and > > security, have ports to other kernels, including *bsd ones and also > > others, etc. It has around a thousand volunteering developers, and still > > has a hard time doing what it's doing, getting releases out usually a > > year later than hoped. Why should people help you and not them? > > For a start, I don't want to sound like I'm bitching about other projects. > The single thing I can think of why Kodix could be better than other > projects is that we are motivated by the KISS concept (keep it simple > stupid). We don't mangle the pristine sources too much, and try to keep the > patches to the minimum necessary. Debian and friends have tons of legacy > code, the building system is much too complicated for what it should do. Our > build system and package manager are 2 small python scripts that are suposed > to do dpkg's and apt's job together. (see kodix-package in the svn > repository) But are you sure the right thing is to dump Debian (or gentoo, for that matter) and start from scratch? Debian isn't just dpkg and apt. In fact, writing from scratch dpkg and apt is a relatively-little project, if what you want is KISS in the package manager. Debian also has a large archive. Recreating this part is much more work. Of course, if you consider the entire Debian archive and infrastructure to be full of legacy (which it probably is), etc., then you have no option. But my own experience says that real life isn't _that_ simple, and if you manage to get enough users and momentum, you'll turn up to also have legacy cruft etc. You'll probably also find out that you do not agree with all of the decisions of your volunteers, and either let your archive loose quality (by your definitions) or spend a lot of time fixing their work. > Other distributions package naming system is biased towards the binary > packages, while we name them after the sources. Just some examples, we have > gcc and gcc-lib instead of gcc and libstdc++, mysql and mysql-lib instead of While it makes some sense, why do you think it's important? > mysql and libmysql. Also all packages names are lowercase, without Also in Debian. But I am not sure it's that important either. > exceptions. So we have python, gconf, and not Python and GConf. And last, we > try not to mangle package names, so we don't have a 'kernel' package, we > have linux, linux-smp, linux24, etc.. > > "My gut feeling says the only reason for you or anyone else to go and > spend a lot of time on kodix is that you can't easily see all the effort > invested until today going to be wasted and thrown away." > Not at all. I am a freelance developer, and I work on clients' projects > using only free software. So I am contributing to Kodix as I would > contribute to any other project if I was using it. Kodix won't die as long > as I work in this field, which will be probably for as long as I live (I'm > 33 and don't have any plans to die soon :). We didn't start the project for > the sake of publicity, popularity or money. So, even if nobody will help, we > will still be there. Even if there won't be any 'we' anymore, I'll be there. That's admirable, but do you really think one person can manage keeping up with updates of 2000 packages? You already say it's too hard. > > So the real question is not why Kodix is better than distro X, but what can > you offer to make it better than distro X. Maybe that's the question from your POV. My quesion is different from both of these: it is: "Suppose I want to help Free Software. Given my set of abilities and interests, and the limited time I want to devote, what is the best way?". For me personally, it wasn't helping some specific distribution, but mainly participating in this mailing list and a few small projects. But as I said, if I decided I want to help a specific distro, I would choose one of the big ones. -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
