Hi, I've had a discussion with rwhitby on IRC and it highlights some confusion about the direction of Angstrom development.
As I see things, angstrom is meant to be a kind of showcase distribution for OE, doing things the "right" way. Obviously OE is more than just say PDAs and includes nas, set top boxes and phones amongst other things. The question is whether Angstrom plans to try and work with everything or just a subset or OE's devices? I'm guessing the answer to this question is the usual "it depends what developers contribute" which is fair enough. An example issue we were discussing was angstrom images running on nslu2. The problem is standard angstrom is too big to fit in the flash. Would angstrom accept patches to slim it down on certain machines or is this something that should be done outside of it? My personal view is that ideally any distro will run on any machine. If it won't, it suggests a problem with either the machine configuration or the distro configuration. (and yes, in reality I know that will never happen in all cases but I can dream and this is something Angstrom could aim for). There is a fine line here before you get to policy decisions too which are meant to be what distro configs are all about. Since the classes of devices (pda, nas, phone) are different, will one policy apply across them all or will the different classes be able to influence policy if angstrom does choose to support them all? rwhitby mentioned considering subclassing angstrom in some form so he has the option of having differing policy within the distro. I understand the reasoning for that and don't see this as a problem (note this doesn't mean there have to be differences, it just gives options). OE certainly gives you the power to do this relatively easily (although as always there are things that could be done to improve it). Is Angstrom going to support subclassing, be indifferent to it or hostile? Personally, I'd like to see it supporting it but I'm interested to see what others think. We have a strong community of nas hackers and I continue to be impressed by the way they've used OE and developed their community of users. If we can find a way to work together and have a common core to both the pda and router worlds, I think it would be great to see and would really show the power inherent in OE's structure. In doing this, we don't want to cause any friction (i.e. by pulling angstrom in two different directions). Subclassing might be the way to handle this but there is still the question of which changes would be acceptable to the angstrom core and which wouldn't. Discussion welcome :) Cheers, Richard _______________________________________________ Angstrom-distro-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/angstrom-distro-devel
