Road map--or some such.

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

Hi,

Since I'm the maintainer (whatever that really means) of the GNU
system, I might just as well say hi.  Hi!

Feel free to raise any kind of subject that might be related to the
GNU system, or comment about anything you either dislike or like.  If
we want to get a good system that everyone is happy to use, we must
take everyones needs into account, and this involves comments from
people.


Now to business.  Several things need to be done before we can even
consider a alpha-release of GNU.  Like the creation of a installer, a
package manager/builder, and a whole slew of other things.  But these
are the two things that need to be done first before one can worry
about other things.


The package builder/manager
***************************

I am in particularly fond of having something like the BSD Ports
system to build, and manage GNU.  This is important since we don't
have a "central" source tree of the system like the BSD's.  The
package management system should of course support binary packages,
since we know that users are really lazy, and it is just be unfeasible
to compile something big like Gnome (even on a fast machine).

The package builder
===================

For the package build system I was intending to use GAR (by Nick
Moffitt), it is quite small and easy to figure out (which means easy
to maintain!), it is also provides most of the things we could
possible need.  And from the looks it is easy to add features too.

The only thing that I am a bit "worried" about is making GAR a GNU
project, this would be nice on several accounts.  But this is better
raised with Nick Moffitt.  Anyway, if it can't be made into a GNU
project, I think we can still live. :-)

The package manager
===================

On this issue I am still quite undecided, the obvious thing is to use
GNU stow (and then later on use stowfs when it gets written).  As to
how the actual binary packages should look like, how they should be
installed etc, is something quite blank.  Does anyone know of a
already existing package manager that we could use?

I am not particular fond of dpkg/rpm, since they provide to much, and
are to bulky for what they do.  Of course it would be nice if we can
use something that is already written, writing something from scratch
takes to much time.


The installer
*************

This was nicely described by Wolfgang.  So I'll skip it completely.


The rest ...
************

... can wait.  But if anyone has anything they wish to see, or even
wish to work on feel free to suggest it.


Oh, I might note that I want to see a working system (doesn't need to
be in a releasable state) by the end of this year. :-)

Happy hacking!