It's a little funny, given the recent thread on "A GNU distro" - but I've also been ruminating over the idea of a new, highly experimental distro. The main idea would be "no patches" aside from patches officially distributed by the same upstream. The only exception would be for packages with ancient build systems that *require* you to edit a Makefile and/or a config header, and then only to do said editing. Other points along the same lines: * Only package released versions of software - no alpha/beta/pre versions, definitely no random SCM revisions. * Always keep up to date with the latest released versions. (With possible exceptions if upstream clearly provides support for older versions - then packaging supported older versions in addition to the newest version as an alternative would be acceptable.) * If a package is unmaintained to the point that its latest release no longer builds using the latest released versions of its dependencies and the toolchain, then it's simply not packaged (or removed after a reasonable probation period). * No elaborate custom configurations. (Here the example I have in mind is currently, to install Qt in /usr requires about 10 to 20 different path specification flags, so the distro would consider that not really supported by upstream. It would need to install it somewhere like /usr/lib/qt5 and then add that to PATH and ld.so.conf.d. Of course, if future versions of Qt explicitly added some more convenient way for a distribution to install to /usr, that would change.) * Any distribution-specific theming must be in clearly separate packages from the upstream software.
Unresolved questions: * What to do if some upstream makes a full release, but to build it requires prerelease versions of some of its dependencies. * What to do if some upstream considers itself "too cool" to make releases. (My thoughts there are: maybe then the patch-free distro treats this situation as if upstream has declared that the latest git revision is always the supported release.) Anyway, I think out of the distributions I know of, LFS/BLFS is the closest to this - but even that includes the coreutils i18n patch, and minimal patches to fix compilation errors. As I said, this would be an experiment to see how usable a system with no patches whatsoever would be in practice. -- Daniel Schepler -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
