Hi, sorry for the long delay, and sorry for this long email O:) On Fri, 2012-06-29 at 16:27 -0400, Colin Walters wrote: > On Fri, 2012-06-29 at 18:11 +0300, Andres Gomez wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I've joint recently this list and I've been playing for a while with > > OSTree and friends so I would like to introduce myself briefly. > > > > My name is Andres Gomez and, as Adrián, I'm working for Igalia. I'm from > > a Spanish town called León, although I'm now living in Helsinki. > > > > As I was saying, I had been playing for a while with OSTree and I'm > > going to keep dedicating some of my daily working time to help on > > pushing this project. > > That's great to hear! I'm curious what your thoughts are on the project > overall and what you plan to work on? ... The guidance to start looking into OSTree comes from the people that is more involved into GNOME OS in Igalia. Xan (López) pointed us (Adrián and me) in this direction with the idea of helping to build the "GNOME OS Installer" Therefore, I started looking into the OSTree documentation at live.gnome.org and the code repositories, as it seems that OSTree could be the tool used for the distribution of GNOME OS. After these days I must say that I like your approach although I have some doubts. In relation to the distribution of the software not integrated into the gnome-os trees, I've seen that glick2 (or similar) could be a solution. Now, I see how this could be a great solution for software just started on the GNOME session but I have some doubts about the software that either have to run as root or just services that start during the boot of the machine. Maybe I'm just not seen that bundled software could also be used for root and those system services. As a simple example: if I understand correctly, some software like Apache would not be included in the tree. If so, you can switch Apache with any other system service like, for example, Radius. How would be the distribution and configuration of a Radius service in an OSTree-d system? I understand that this software is not the one a "normal" GNOME user would need but I wanted to know how do you think this can be solved, anyway :) The other major doubt I have is about the paradigm "everything in etc is a bug". What I mean is that, but for some inevitable files like passwd or similar, the proposal is that every software which needs any kind of configuration in /etc would be patched so the default "built-in" settings would be the proper ones and only the "customized" ones would be merged (unionfs?, soft links?) from /var, for example. What I see is that in addition to maybe becoming a "big" task to patch all the needed software, one of the benefits of forgetting about packaging systems like dpkg or rpm would be that software would be coming clean from the sources (git repositories). If patches have to be created for all the software with any file in /etc, it seems to me that we are getting rid of the debian/ subdirs to get the "load" of having to track that software now and in the future to patch it correctly. Obviously, I suppose that even some software would merge those patches upstream, but I doubt that most of them would accept them. -- Now, I have to say that I'm not that experienced in building and packaging, nor in general systems tasks. I'm a regular Debian user and often packager and I've been doing system tasks in the past, but not regularly since some years. Also, I was a rpm user but my knowledge in that is quite dusty. In the last years I've been mainly developing in the UI level in C (glib-gobject), although I can defend myself in several other languages O:) So, regarding your question about "what do you plan to work on", I have to say that my main target, as I was saying, would be to start the GNOME OS Installer. I was checking the mockups at live.gnome.org: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Installer Checking these mockups and some other info about the "First Time" settings, I understand that one of the main duties of the Installer would be to use OSTree. Hence, I'm also ready to help on improving OSTree. Talking with Adrián, it seemed clear to us that a way of boosting our participation and the help we can offer you would be if you could actually identify well defined tasks in which we could start helping you. This is: I think I may ask you to take some time to think on tasks for your new slaves :D Also, any guidance you can provide me (us) for the way of starting to create this Installer would be welcome. I suppose a good starting point would be getting in contact with Jon McCann and taking a look to Anaconda's code, but suggestions are welcome. I think this has been already a long and boring enough mail! Thanks in advance! Br. -- Andres Gomez Computer Science Engineer mailto:agomez igalia com http://blogs.igalia.com/agomez/category/igaliacom/ IGALIA, S.L. http://www.igalia.com
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