Hello,
First off, thanks to everyone for the comments given, they were very
helpful. Based in part on the comments, and upon my own estimation of
the project, I have a proposal to make wrt the future of the project.
I'll try to keep it as brief as possible, but here are the changes to
the goals and rules of the project I'm proposing (comments, suggestions,
corrections and questions most welcome):
1. Any officially supported and promoted release must not deviate from
LFS or BLFS in any way.
The purpose of this is to keep the CDs valid as working examples of
both LFS and BLFS. I do not count as deviations configuration files
or custom scripts to ease booting or configuring the CD. What I mean
by deviation is installing packages that do not appear in either
book, changing the build order for the base system, or using switches
that either do not appear in the books or are not listed as
possibilities. A secondary purpose is that by sticking closely to the
books, it should make development and maintenance of the official CD
easier.
This limitation will undoubtedly bring up questions regarding extra
functionality that is currently covered in the latest CDs.
See item 2 for that.
2. Packages or build parameters/methods which do not appear in LFS or
BLFS, but which will undoubtedly increase the CD's value to large groups
of users can be developed and released in "unofficial" CDs with the hope
and intention that these changes can be pushed upstream to LFS or BLFS.
A great example here is i18n. A good deal of i18n support is already
covered in LFS, but there are undoubtedly tweaks that would improve
the CD's usefulness but do not appear in the books. The "right thing
to do" in my opinion, is to at the least allow for these sorts of
modifications in LFS and BLFS. The unofficial CDs provide a sandbox
for building and testing which can improve the quality and usefulness
of the books.
3. The main official CD will be a minimal 'Core' CD. Basically bare LFS
with just enough added BLFS functionality to connect to the internet (or
a local network), read an LFS book online, download packages and render
a book locally.
What is actually included can be discussed and decided upon. I prefer
once we decide that it be somewhat etched in stone, too. Other
features can be covered in item 4.
4. Apart from the core, we can have extra "official" and "unofficial"
packages which can be added to the core to produce an individual, custom
CD. The difference between "official" and "unofficial" has to do with
whether or not the package is included in BLFS and is built by-the-book.
The extent to which we have and provide external packages is based
the willingness of individuals within the community to maintain them.
5. The scripts to produce the core official CD shall be rewritten and
shall look to be done via some PM for ease of maintenance and for ease
of merging packages into the core.
This may sound like it conflicts with item 1. Technically, it doesn't
since LFS allows for a PM, but even so, it would have to be a PM
which doesn't rely on some external libraries not present in LFS.
Something simple based on tar and shell scripts would be my
preference, although if we wanted to pursue something like RPM, we
would have the opportunity to do so in an unofficial CD.
I would hope that by following the above, we would achieve solid, stable
CDs, a more unified project as a whole, an 'easy to jump in' sort of
framework which can allow for testing of experimental ideas and pushing
up the quality of all books.
That's basically it... thoughts?
--
JH
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