Chris Geddings wrote:
Can you frame out what the word 'distro' means in your vision?
Distro is a linux distribution. Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, and
Debian are all distros. The 'vision' if it should even be called that
is an easy way to customize those established distros and re-distribute
a new distro. These new custom distros would be more solution specific
than the established distros. Examples, Defining a custom desktop for a
company, dedicated servers (email, webserver, application
firewall(Zorp), CMS (/.), etc..), beowolf clusters, gamming distro, and
the list goes on...
I'm thinking one major problem you are going to see will center around
packaging and distribution centric assumptions in packages. I admit to
being largely RedHat focused for the past few years, so I'm not sure how
much of what I understand in distributions has been widely adopted
versus rh centric.
Well, I have built distros from RedHat(Fedora)/Mandrake and run test
around Suse. They all use RPM and Anaconda. Of course a package for
RedHat probably will not work in a different base distro (Suse or
Mandrake) but the solution I propose still provides some value. For
example, A user in company A defines a customized desktop distribution
around Mandrake; another user whose company B uses RedHat could use the
previous distro specification as a starting point(what packages, ks
config, linux config, etc) to create a similar distro for hist company.
Eventually, I think I can automate this process. I would also hope that
each custom distro would be able to fall under existing supprt contracts
with RedHat and Mandrake. The big anomoly is Debian. I will work on
that one last but I am designing the solution with package distribution
features so any distro that uses packages (rpm or apt) should be
pluggable into the solution.
I'm thinking about things like chkconfig for service management.
Differing versions of rpm not always playing well together. Different
distributions assumptions about what it is a package is providing and
where files should go.
Yes, that is exactly right. To solve this the first choice in creating
a distro will be what base distro to use. That will limit which
packages you should access. But with all the packages in one place
there is no reason why you could not try another distro's package. This
probably will not work but what the hell... If this idea catches on
maybe enough people could push the big distro's to standardize, who knows...
