Re: Unidentified subject!

[Mike Neuffer <mike@i-Connect.Net>]

On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:
> There are some real problems with Debian, and I'm trying to address them.
> As nice as dpkg/dselect are from a technical standpoint, they are difficult
> to use, there's no reason for them to be difficult to use, and the problem
> isn't being fixed. We don't have to dispose of dpkg/dselect if we're going
> to fix their problems. So far, I don't see the problems being fixed.
> 
> You can expect me to bring this same issue up over and over until I see
> some action.

SO ? I don't mind that, since dselect is indeed our biggest problem.

I pointed this stuff out to you a long time ago and you took the
standpoint I am taking now. 

The moment Debian moves to .rpm, Debian is dead. The only advantage we
have over RH is the superior packaging system. It still needs to mature
quite a bit, but we wil get to that point eventually.

I would just wish that some people would really as I suggested before take
a close look at what FreeBSD is doing. Defining an essential core system
(ca. 60-100MB installed binary size) that contains everything an Unix
system needs to run _properly_ is an essential step. 

The sources for this system should be in ONE source tree so that it can be
build with one command (known as "make world" in all BSD and most
professional Unix systems). This will give us one essential system
where everything fits together and where you have no problems because one
developer compiled a package in this or that special evironment. It would
also make sure that all packages are really compileable.  

The whole system could essentially be tarred together and dumped on a new
machine. This is how it works in *BSD. You have ONE bootfloppy, that is
able to get the chunks (the tarfile is beeing chopped in handy chunks that
fit on a floppy) via ftp from one of the ftp<n>.<country>.freebsd.org
machines or from floppy or from CDROM and that essentally untars the
system on the harddisk after partitioning it.

You have basically only 4 choices for basic configurations:

Development machine with or without X11
and user machine with or without X11

Once this is done you can in FreeBSD use pkg_add, pkd_delete, etc
to manipulate additional packages. (This could be improved with
a dselect2 or whatever it might be called)
 
If you want to update your system you just cd into /usr/src
and do a make world and your whole system is beeing recompiled and 
updated (no need to shut down the machine).

To update your sources you simply use cvsup which gets controlled 
via a tiny config file the newes diffs to your current source tree
and applies them. A make world again brings your system uptodate
and all programs, libs and compilers are in sync since everything gets
build properly.

The same is true for add-on packages, which reside in /usr/src/ports.
Or to be more exact the makefiles and diffs reside there together with the
information in the Makefile how and where to get the latest version.

Building something like this would defintely not be easy, but it would
make sure that we have a core system where everything REALLY fits
together.

Mike

Michael Neuffer                i-Connect.Net, a Division of iConnect Corp.
mike@i-Connect.Net             Home of the Debian Master Server.
mike@debian.org                14355 SW Allen Blvd., Suite 140
503.641.8774                   Beaverton, OR 97005




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