So... Anaconda is evolving nicely. It looks great, it runs on many architectures, it's very easy to extend, it's very clean, what more can anyone want? Right? Wrong! We should look in the future, there are features that we've seen in other distros which are so appreciated. I'd like to high-light two of them: 1) Multiple OS. Debian GNU system can run not only on top of Linux but also on top of HURD and FreeBSD and others, using glibc and BSD-libc. This should be interesting: Attempting to package the FreeBSD/HURD kernel as an rpm, creating a Fedora Core GNU/FreeBSD version. Although not that useful (not at all actually), it would be nice to have Fedora Core run under FreeBSD. 2) Compile with optimizations. Gentoo was the first one to introduce this. Instead of coming with the /Fedora/RPMS directory, the distribution could come only with /SRPMS, or both: if the user has enough time and patience, he can recompile the system, if not, just install the i386 binaries. The stage2.img could have also some minimal (~80MBytes) system to include glibc and gcc and a few others, then start recompiling packages with optimizations. Compile one, install-it, clean the compile traces, depending on the settings, keep the compiled packages after install, or remove them. A few extra macros could be created for some new targets in rpmbuild (such as Pentium3/Pentium3-unstable (-O3 and others) or something else), spec's should be modified again, to include special arguments or over-rides for new architectures, where the default optimized headers would not work. Another advantage to this approach is that only a small part (~200MBytes) would be architecture-dependent. The rest, could be used also on other architectures. A serious issue here is solving the build dependencies, provided that they are correctly recorded in the spec files. Anaconda, for example, does not depend on py-xf86config and parted, last time I checked, this is a binary package dep though, nevermind this example. I'll start to implement something like this in the near future, but a lot of things should be changed before that (new targets for rpms). Example targets for x86, but there are more: i386 i586 i686 K6 K6-2 Athlon AthlonXP Pentium ]I[ Pentium IV Each one of these could have a stable/unstable (bleeding-edge) macro. Other issues: I'm sure that this should belong to fedora-devel list, but I'm asking here (yeah, /me lazy). Shouldn't the comps.xml in rawhide also contain kde-libs? Because it doesn't. It has only kde-libs-devel. Cheers, Razvan VILT
