Harish, On 07/06/2011 09:36 AM, harish badrinath wrote: > Going by the terminology in use today, what is the difference between > the (a) debian blends (b) remastered debian system. > > Here debian is the term used to denote debian/ubuntu/projects derived > from these projects.
I would describe it two ways: Technical The process for creation of a blend involves starting with a Debian or derivative repository and creating an image directly from that (live, install or otherwise) that contains a selection of material from that repository delivered in such a way that it is usable by a particular target user for a particular purpose with a minimum of effort. By contrast, the process of remastering generally involves first downloading an image produced by the parent distro (live, install or otherwise,) then tearing it apart and reassembling it with your customizations applied. Philosophical The blends philosophy is to work as closely with the parent distro as possible. If possible, the project should be done entirely within the distro as a subproject, containing only material supplied by the parent distro. We call this a "pure blend". The remastering philosophy (if it can be called that) seems to be "whatever works" and involves little or no interaction with the parent distro. It's a lazy approach used by people who have newly discovered that they can hack images to make them into custom images to make something uniquely theirs. Fine, I guess, for quick-and-dirty results, but not something I would consider supportable in the long run. I believe the users of a blend are served better than the users of a remaster because of these advantages: Technical advantage A new version of a well-crafted blend ought to be able to be produced at any time directly from the repository simply by building it; the user has some assurance that the resulting system remains 'untainted' by hacking it up with scripts that 'damage' the original system by removing files from packages, changing files in packages, etc. something that hurts maintainability / support for such a system. Community advantage A blend project aims to leverage support resources from the existing community to serve some sub-community within it. They accomplish this by not violating Debian packaging policy, producing something that is either pure Debian (a "pure blend") or Debian + additional packages, rather than some frankendistro artlessly stitched together from someone else's distro with scripts that change things everywhere with no regard to policy. Thus, normal support channels can be used with a pure blend since what you end up with is not a derivative at all, but just Debian, set up and ready to go for whatever you wanted to use it for. Ben -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
