Hi, On IRC, I recently asked both Michael and António about the upcoming base system development that both have been thinking about, especially now that Michael appears to have made some hosting/sponsoring arrangements for the FL infra (I'm not quite sure if it is in an official capacity, or if it is something Michael is doing on the side, so to speak).
I've been on an extended hiatus from FL, because I grew frustrated with what I perceived as a crufty base system which was in my view difficult and/or annoying to get to work with the modern technologies that I would prefer to use, such as dracut (initrd framework), plymouth (graphical boot framework) and systemd. As a consequence, I am now using fedora, but I still pine for conary if I'm perfectly honest. As I understood it, when I asked about Michael's idea of an ideal FL base system, he mentioned how in his view RH is moving too slow, while fedora is perhaps sometimes too close to the bleeding/experimental edge for comfort. To me it sounded as if he was aiming for a base system that approaches the stability of RH but uses conary to retain agility and approaches the modernity (if perhaps sometimes prematurely so) of the fedora base. As I understand it, António has long wanted something similar. For me, my perfect FL system would look something like the following: Base system: Self-contained, text-only system which leverages recent plumbing work and uses dracut and systemd and much of the fedora base where it makes sense, such as bash, gcc, glibc, kernel (including DRM/KMS drivers and firmware) etc. If we use a fedora-ish base system, we can also leverage fedora user-management GUI tools. Given my experience with hacking on the GNOME user management tools, this is frankly a far more appealing prospect for me. Base system daemons/packages that I could see myself using, based on the idea of one well-maintained tool per niche: - Apache - Samba (3.6.x for starters, as it supports the SMB 2.0 protocol, which is rather fast) - vsftpd - KVM + associated VM-ready plumbing - Whatever smtpd mkj needs/likes (so probably sendmail, though I have mostly used postfix myself) - printing subsystem (I guess CUPS is the de facto standard here, Apple owns it now, right?) - one and only one traditional syslog daemon (rsyslog or syslog-ng) with a reasonable default setup, including sensible log-rotation - Postgresql (it is not entirely clear to me whether MySQL or MariaDB are a hard requirement for some people these days?) - Logitech Media Center (formerly squeezeserver/squeezeboxserver) internet radio/music streaming server Desktop/GUI (just included for reference): - XBMC (HTPC duty) - Xfce (what I currently use on my home server/mail/web box from which I'm writing this mail) - GNOME 3/Cinnamon (for the GNOME ecosystem, especially gnome-keyring manager - what I use on my laptop) - Thunderbird - Firefox - Chromium - GIMP - Gaupol (for editing and tweaking danish subtitles of, ah, backup copies of TV series) - GNOME Mplayer (nice MPlayer front-end) - LibreOffice - PulseAudio - Virt-Manager with SPICE graphical acceleration support Plymouth: I'd prefer if we could use plymouth with dracut and systemd, but I know that Michael has had a less-than-ideal experience with plymouth and has been known to disable it on his local systems. From my fedora experience, it seems that fedora has a pretty good handle on how to make it work like it should, so at this point I personally consider it a fairly well-understood and stable piece of tech. Bootloader: I much prefer the simplicity of the Syslinux config over what I perceive to be the frankly bizarre complexity of GRUB 2. As I understand it, Syslinux 6.0 with EFI support is well on the way and Syslinux v4.x is fairly stable. Syslinux 5.x was about rewriting much of Syslinux v4.x in C rather than assembly as I understand it. How far off base am I in the above? Am I the only one who would like to see FL develop along the lines laid out here? How do you guys see the new and improved FL? Cheers, -Rune _______________________________________________ Foresight-devel mailing list Foresight-devel@lists.rpath.org http://lists.rpath.org/mailman/listinfo/foresight-devel
