Until now we have done most of our development and testing on Fedora Core Linux. The FC 2 we've been using is quite outdated by now. We've also found that keeping FC system up to date, and upgrading to newer FC versions can be quite a bit of work. This is just to say it's again time to think about our Linux story.
First of all, I do think it is beneficial to have one official Linux version which is supported by IT, so there is the question of which distribution should we choose for general, IT-supported Linux platform. My first suggestion would be to go with Ubuntu. It is a distribution growing very fast in following, it has active corporate backer and it just seems to work well. Many people at OSAF already use it. Since it's Debian based, keeping an Ubuntu system up to date and even upgrading it to newer versions is easy. My main reservation against Ubuntu is that it is lacking in some developer tools and some more esoteric programs. With this I mean the binaries available in the package database - one can of course always get the sources and build. One such missing piece is KCachegrind which is a nice program to analyze profile runs visually. If we could find an easy way to get all the dev tools on Ubuntu, this wouldn't be an issue. Anybody have other viable suggestions (I think we want to stick to some popular distribution)? Votes for or against Ubuntu? In 0.7 we should also take a more careful look at how we distribute Chandler on Linux. Ideally with modern package systems we'd have Chandler rely on packages already on the system (or installed because of marked dependencies). To make this possible we need to do some work with our build system. The actual packaging of Chandler could be done by volunteers already familiar with the packaging systems of their platforms. This starts making sense now that Chandler is actually becoming usable. I've also been keeping an eye on some new/unusual packaging systems on Linux which we might want to try out. For example, there is Klik which resembles the OSX system in the sense that you make a disk image of everything your program needs, and mount that to run the program. This means you avoid much of the hassle of library version mismatches. -- Heikki Toivonen
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