Re: [Gnewsense-dev] gNewSense 5

[Bob Ham]

On Tue, 2016-05-03 at 23:59 +0200, Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> I'm thinking about speeding up development for gNewSense 5 (and
> beyond). I've assembled some thoughts [1] on the wiki. Other
> ideas/comments are welcome.

From the wiki page:

> Go back to Builder style of development?

Definitely.  The fact that Ucclia packages were manually developed was a
massive turn off for helping.


> Code repository contains helper scripts instead of patches.

For Trisquel it contains both, e.g.

https://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel/package-helpers/blob/belenos/helpers/DATA/fop/replace-sRGB-profile.patch
https://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel/package-helpers/blob/belenos/helpers/make-fop

where the helper script applies a patch.  There's quite a few of those.


> Could only be used for 1 distro at a time.

I don't understand this.  Do you mean you want to bring packages from
more than one upstream, like Debian and Ubuntu?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to be very clear here about what the
goal of gNewSense is.  Would you care to share what your personal goals
are with gNewSense, Sam?  And for that matter, anyone else looking to
help?

Personally, what I want is a version of Debian modified to adhere to the
FSF's Free System Distribution Guidelines, nothing more.  It doesn't
make sense to me to do anything beyond bringing a non-FSDG-compliant
distro into compliance and making it presentable.  From the perspective
of software freedom, it seems like there are bigger fish to fry.


> Packages that need changes to binary content (like openoffice.org in
> gNewSense 2) are very hard or impossible to handle.

Could you explain a little more about this, particular why it's
difficult to handle?  Do you know how Trisquel have dealt with this
problem?


From http://www.gnewsense.org/Processes/Packaging:

> we want to include software that is not (yet) in Debian, but which is
> very useful to free software users.

Could you give an example of such software?  Personally, I'm happy to
live with Debian's slow releases.  That's one of the consequences of
Debian's high quality and I'm happy to live with it.  If I wanted more
up-to-date software, I'd just use Trisquel :-)

That said, I can see that there may exist a need to integrate
gNewSense-specific packages or have updated packages.  However, that
seems simply like a technical problem for the build system.

I had a look at Trisquel's system a while back and it's not rocket
science.  There's no reason we can't make it do whatever we want.


One question I have is: does gNewSense have builder machines running
pbuilder or whatever?  In fact, is there any information about
gNewSense's infrastructure anywhere?  I couldn't find anything on the
wiki.

Cheers,

Bob

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