Re: Themes (again)

[Liam Proven]

On 27 September 2013 16:21, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
> I mean "like others do" :  release a set of tarball files and a few
> instructions to setup.

*Tarballs*? Seriously?!

No. Not tarballs. That is the last thing that we want to be doing. Not
in 2013. In 1993, yes; in 1998, maybe.

No, any current distro has package management, automatic dependency
resolution, etc. This helps, and tarballs completely break it and
leave a distro that cannot be upgraded or even maintained.

We have .deb packages and a SUSE VM image.

Perhaps packages for the big 3 distros - Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. That
covers 75% or so of FOSS Unix users. Either for the current version
only, or perhaps in the case of Ubuntu, the current stable version.

With modest work, it is possible to produce packages that will install
on both Ubuntu and Debian - that would be best of all.

> This would be the first step. That would allow a desktop to be setup by
> tweaking current installations done with packages from distribs.

So would actual distro packages.

If it's too much work to produce separate packages for all the
components, then a simpler approach would be to try to create one huge
package that depends on nothing more than a kernel, glibc and X.11 -
one which includes all needed libraries. Then a single .deb would work
on Debian, Ubuntu, Mepis, Mint, Crunchbang etc., and a single RPM on
Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS,

How realistic that is, though, I am unsure. Possibly not very.

If supporting multiple distros is too much work, then I would say
target just one.

I have been experimentally building minimal Ubuntu & Debian systems
with a GNUstep desktop built purely from the packages in those distros
for a couple of years now. It works reasonably well, but I found
GWorkspace too unstable to use - it dies continually, seldom running
for as long as 10-15 minutes, and when it goes it takes all GNUstep
apps with it.

I was hoping to get to the stage of something stable enough to try to
build an ISO image using Remastersys: http://www.remastersys.com/

However, it is no longer being developed, meaning that there is a
window of 6mth more for this approach before it no longer supports the
current Ubuntu LTS.

I would strongly advocate Ubuntu - it is by far the most widely-used
Linux now, it has freeware proprietary addins (unlike Fedora) and is
relatively small and simple (unlike SUSE). It is very easy to strip
down to a bare system - just start with Ubuntu Server, which has no X
or anything preloaded. Ubuntu's hardware support and support for
proprietary addins is considerably better than Debian; to get Debian
fully working on my hardware took 48h of concentrated work and I never
got my sound card working. Ubuntu took 90min. In my fairly extensive
experience, this can be regarded as typical.

If anyone would like to help me try to assemble a GNUstep-based Ubuntu
Precise remix, I would welcome it.

-- 
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