Hello everyone, It is always best to put your money where your mouth is :-). PacketFilter v1.71 was released over the weekend promoting a new packaging concept explained at http://leaf.sourceforge.net/devel/scaron/leaf.htm
This is a maintenance release for PacketFilter wich was piggybacking (?) Charles's Dachstein floppy release. In fact, PacketFilter itself is unaware of the change, except for the display of the string "Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall" in the menu. Please note that this is an existing trend: Jacques Nilo is already distributing Shorewall independantly of his Bering distribution. The page above formalize a way to package an appliance such that it is possible to substitute one LEAF environment for another without touching the appliance. The page provide start-up kits and define how Mike, Arne and Ewald could create a replacement kit that would not break the appliance. If such were the case, a developer would now have a choice of kits, each abstracting different kernel versions. This is an interesthing growth path, especially when evaluating competing proposals. >From reading this page, it becomes obvious that the LEAF project needs a librarian, a package repository, and a distribution point for prebuilt kernels. Hint, hint, hint anyone? My personnal developer page also points to this page, just to see if I will get some comments from the general public. The teaser is a LEAF workstation, an appliance that should generate some interest in what else this project can offer. I do hope that Charles, David, and Jacques will comment on this proposal. I have experimented at length with both Dachstein and Shorewall to make sure that this implementation did not impact either project in any way. It has been my experience that lrp files are communicating vases and, in fact, each of these project ends up with exactly the same files packaged a different way. For those of you that want to experiment with different libraries, the PacketFilter lrp package contains no binaries. Between the PacketFilter bootdisk and the LEAF workstation, the following packages are used: ipchains, dhcpcd, ppp, pppoe, libz, ssh, bindc, dhcpd, brctl, rrlogind, and whois. Therefore, if your move to different C libraries is equivalent or better, you won't even have to edit anything on the boot disk: just replace the file LEAF.lrp and go! It will be interesting to see the impact of moving away from glibc 2.0.7 will have on the LEAF project. This proposal benefits everyone without limiting what any individual may do, user or developer. Regards to all, Serge Caron _______________________________________________ Leaf-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
