On Sun, 2009-05-03 at 17:08 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 11:35:24AM -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > So I would like to really ask you and others to stop thinking of Moblin
> > as "Fedora with changes" and measure everything against that. I realize
> > it's easy to think that, and a lot of things just won't make sense in
> > that mindset.
>
> I ended up analysing this while otherwise bored. There's nothing
> especially surprising in the moblin repositories. The large majority of
> the packages are Fedora derived, with a small number from suse
> (primarily the toolchain, as Arjan said) and a few custom ones.
>
> Figuring out the proportion of the packages that were Fedora derived was
> actually surprisingly difficult. A large number of the specfiles have
> been processed through something called specbuilder. The behaviour of
> this seems to have varied between versions - some remove the original
> changelog, some don't. In some cases the specfiles are identical to the
> Fedora ones (to the extent of including comments) but have simply had
> the changelog entries stripped.
There is a reasonably legitimate technical reason for this, which is
that the changelogs end up in the rpmdb, which is wasted disk space for
the moblin use case (user just wants firefox and doesn't care about
package changelogs). It's about 24M on my machine, for instance.
Of course that's also something you could strip out at rpmbuild time...
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, but right now it's
> kind of hard to see how moblin is anyone other than Fedora with changes.
> I don't think that puts Intel under any sort of obligation to feed
> changes back to us and I agree that Koji isn't ideally suited to
> producing the kind of derivative that Intel want to, but it would be
> nice to acknowledge the amount of the project that's built on the work
> of Fedora contributors.
Just to underline this point, let's look at what the Moblin FAQ has to
say on the subject:
Q Is Moblin v2.0 based on another distribution?
Moblin v2.0 borrows components from various distributions, but
is not based on another distribution.
[ source: http://moblin.org/documentation/moblin-overview/faq ]
This seems... disingenuous? I guess it all depends on what the
definition of the word "based" is. It's also the sort of statement that
begs immediate deconstruction. If moblin _isn't_ based on another
distribution, why does it feel the need to say so. On the other hand,
if it is, why does it say it isn't.
- ajax
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