Heya lads, Just subscribed to the list, and read through the archives, and here are my thoughts. As I already said when talking to Seth and Mikael, I'd be interested in gnome-os if we'd be using Debian as the base. Debian are very responsive to well thought enhancements. ie. "Here is a patch that adds this and this, it doesn't break anything but permits people with that package installed to do that". Easy peezy. Debian has good manuals about packaging, and most importantly good rules and tools. If you don't know about it, lintian is a great tool to check for common errors in packaging tools. http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/lintian.html Hopefully, we'd get a few Debian developers interested, so we would be able to upload our custom apps to the debian repository easily, and compiled/propagated through to mirrors painlessly. Most of the packages from Debian we'd be able to use without changes. Check the number of patches that glibc or XFree86 include that aren't in upstream. The developers know what they're doing, even if some of them are a bit high on self-esteem. And we get security fixes *fast* (and we don't have to care about them for packages we don't modify ;) The infrastucture also helps us a lot. /etc/network/interfaces is great, and the ppp configuration (apart from the fact that it's an ncurses app) is straight forward. I even made a patch to allow users to browse their ppp configs with nautilus, but never got to finish it as I didn't need it anymore. And Debian supports a lot of architectures, which is interesting (or not) depending on if you are an x86, or not. Mikael, Debian has a graphical installer that's ready to use, and that will be integrated in woody+1. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/14/ (See "New Installer for Debian?" and follow the link to the debian CVS with UI.txt) As it uses debconf, we can use the gnome ui it has. Here are my thoughts on the requirements for the distro: * sudo integration for administration (Apple does it very very well) * hardware integration (this is going to be very hard for x86 users ;) the default setup should behave well, be it on a laptop or a desktop, and having nice defaults is cool. * using ALSA ! OSS might be very good, but ALSA is the way to go, as it would mean we wouldn't need a sound server if all apps needing sound were to use native ALSA. A patch to libgnome, the correct versions of most libraries/packages (like SDL for example) and we're done. It also supports more soundcards than OSS/free * Easy "sharing" setup: ssh, samba, appletalk, http, and ftp. All optional, all already configured with nice defaults, and a simple GUI that says "Click here to start sharing". (yeah, just like MacOS X) This is a week-end's work with the Debian infrastructure. That's something that's very easy to do, and it would definetely give us an edge. * GUIs for command-line apps. Users shouldn't have to launch a terminal to do a ping or traceroute or such. * A repository for "this-country-doesn't-have-sucky-patent-laws" with things like lame, libdvdcss included, so that the user can get access to these programs with a minimum of problems. * A working automounter, and feedback for hotplug and such. * use of devfs, murasaki for hotplug, choice between ext2 and ext3, etc. (this might be a little too low-level for this discussion i must admit). * Using the XST could make sense, for the boot-loader configuration for example, as different archs will use different bootloaders. * GUI hacking on apps that we need. I'm thinking GPA for GPG configuration, which looks like arse, but does what we would want. * Gnome architectural improvements: password manager, decent file selector, etc. If you're not already, you could subscribe to Apple's weekly developer newsletter which shows you what can be done with their APIs. We won't get as much integration, but it show how much the OS infrastucture should help the developer. That will be it for now. Cheers -- /Bastien Nocera http://hadess.net
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