Hi everyone, I've been meaning to get more involved in the CDD community, and this seems like a good way to introduce myself.
Progeny has a project called Componentized Linux (http://componentizedlinux.org/) which aims to provide a toolkit for builders of custom Debian distributions. Because CL is a toolkit, and because one of the universal things a custom Debian distro wants to do is supply its own branding, we provide a way for CL-based distro developers to easily provide their own branding files in a way that doesn't require forking any of the Debian packages. Here's our current mechanism: In cases where packages include branding (splash screens, background images, themes, etc.) and where it's impossible to supply custom branding by diverting a file or calling a tool (e.g., gconftool-2) in the postinst, CL provides modified packages that use some default, known value, rather than hardcoding the value. For example, we have modified the gdm package to use a graphical greeter theme called "default" rather than "circles", which the default gdm.conf hardcodes and which cannot be diverted because it's a conffile. To specify a theme, then, the custom distro builder supplies a package that "Provides" and "Conflicts" with "cl-branding", which gdm (and other packages that use this mechanism depend on to ensure some default branding is present), and places the appropriate files in the appropriate places. For example, the "progeny-branding" package (which provides branding for Progeny Debian 2.0) installs its default theme to /usr/share/gdm/themes/default. (The "Conflicts" ensures that only one package can provide the "default" theme.) So, in CL, a custom distro builder can change the gdm theme without having to fork the gdm package. The CL infrastructure takes care of providing a gdm package that understands the cl-branding mechanism, and the maintainer of the gnome component takes care of making sure the patch is applied to newer versions of the gdm package as it is released. Of course, I'd rather not have to fork any packages--it's a slippery slope from which there's no escape (and this is speaking from experience, as it's the approach we took with Progeny Debian 1.0). Since this is almost certainly an issue with CDDs, could we work together to come up with a custom branding mechanism that could be merged into Debian proper post-sarge? That way, we could provide a standard mechanism for supplying custom branding that works for all CDDs and doesn't require any forking of packages to achieve it. Note that I'm not wedded to the way we do it today in CL--I'm simply outlining a solution that works for us. I'll be happy with any mechanism to do this that doesn't require us to fork packages to implement it. Note also that this is just another instance of the CDD configuration problem (i.e., if we could provide our own gdm.conf without violating Debian policy, the problem would be solved). Fortunately, we've been able to solve most custom branding issues without having to resort to this mechanism, but that may be because we've been dealing mostly with Gnome, which provides an excellent infrastructure for decoupling the software from the configuration via the gconf system. In the absence of a new configuration framework that separates software from configuration on a system-wide basis in Debian though, there will always be cases where we'll have to deal with this issue, so I think we need to provide a mechanism for doing things like this, at least in the medium term. Thoughts? How are other CDDs dealing with this? -- Ian Murdock 317-578-8882 (office) http://www.progeny.com/ http://ianmurdock.com/ "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of." --Ogden Nash
