On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 09:19 +0100, Glen Gray wrote: > Basically, I've been wondering why the OS seems to be based on a top > down approach (starting with Fedora Core 5 and stripping out a rough > guesstimate of whats not required) rather than a bottom up approach > (starting with nothing and using what parts of FC5 are required to > create a small, tailored OS).
It's not really top-down. We start with a set of packages that we know we are going to need (kernel, glibc, python, gtk, etc) and then use yum to install those (and their dependencies) into a chroot. Then, further fine-grained stripping is done (glibc locale info, etc). We know [almost] exactly what the base set of packages is. Plus, people keep asking for more all the time. You have to strike a balance between a completely forked OLPC distro, and using an existing project's resources, like Fedora. Seriously, putting Fedora together is a full-time job for quite a few people, and there's no reason to think that putting a forked OLPC distro together wouldn't be a full time job for a few people too. These machines aren't normal laptops, and they also aren't PocketPC-class devices either. They are somewhere in between. You make a tradeoff between the amount of effort you make in slimming down the distro, and how much you benefit from upstream resources (ie Fedora). If we fork it and go ground-up, we completely loose all the security, development, and distro work that Fedora is doing. If we go top-down, we completely at efficiency. You have to trade bits of one off against bits of another. You have to start somewhere. > Using this approach would have allowed for a resulting system that had > rpm intact for use as the package manager and a more tightly tailored OS. It's unclear whether there's a need for a package manager or not. Updating will likely not be "rpm -Uhv xxx", but rsyncing files from flash drives or the school server or whatever. We all know the downsides of dpkg/rpm/ipkg/yum/apt/etc, and I'm not sure anyone really wants to inflict those shortcomings on children. You have to ask, what problems does having a package manager solve, and do children care about those problems that _you_ think are problems? The only real requirement here is to allow children to easily use software they get from somewhere. Note that I said "use", not "install." IMHO, you shouldn't have to think about "install", you just get the software from a friend and use it. And I also said "get from somewhere," not "pull from a yum repo." Because most kids aren't going to be running synaptic, or pup, or whatever. The software distribution model here needs to be _vastly_ different than what we in the Linux world are used to. Dan -- olpc-software mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/olpc-software
