Simo Sorce wrote:
On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 12:02 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
I doubt if there are 3 million people
arrogant enough to call themselves experts, though. There are
probably
a few hundred configurations that an expert sysadmin would build for
99%
of uses and the good ones would sort themselves out by reputation and
be
improved by user feedback. The base distribution could then just
concentrate on getting all the programs into a repository and keeping
their interfaces compatible so you didn't have to throw everything
out
to update.
You have heard about how Fedora has built an infrastructure to allow
very easily to create "spins", what do you think that has been built
for ?
You don't get it - I'm not interested in yet another limited set of
choices on a custom CD that is already outdated by the time you download
it. I'd like to see a framework to track an expertly-maintained system
with little extra effort for the person doing the maintenance and none
on the ones following it. If the admin adds or updates packages, the
next update of the tracking machines should do the same.
From another email:
If free software distribution was really about sharing instead of
providing a complex base to sell support and services, I think
something like this would have been done long ago."
Can you spare us this ridiculous rhetoric ?
It is an overgeneralization, but not ridiculous. You can choose between
distributions funded by support/service subscriptions or ones that don't
care much about the user experience and just warehouse the code. I
think we'd be better off with a way to share the support/service work
and make user experiences reproducible in any quantity.
Fedora is now built to make it easy to build spins. Just publishing a
list of packages and let it die in oblivion is not going to help
anybody.
Yes, that's exactly my point - the mechanism must permit tracking the
continuous changes and updates made by the expert.
An expert willing to help others can instead build a spin and
really benefit other people, by providing them with a targeted
distribution without caring about packaging, but just about how to
select and put together packages and making sure you can build an
installable system, which is what your are asking for.
No, that will be wrong by the time it reaches a user's hands. The
mechanism I want is a minimal install that gets yum or an equivalent on
the internet. From there you pick an expert and a purpose for your
machine and automatically get the set of packages installed in a tested,
known-to-work, configuration just like an enterprise IT department might
build for their desktops. Don't like it? Just pick a different one and
the package manager would adjust the installed packages to match. Even
if you have to try several know-working setups to get something you like
it will be vastly easier than individually testing thousands of programs
in all possible combinations yourself, and once you find a working
master system you could always have an equally nicely working copy of it.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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