Re: A GNU Distribution

[Brandon Invergo]

On Tue, 2012-04-10 at 15:58 +0200, Claudio Fontana wrote:
> The goal of sourceinstall is to be able to install arbitrary source
> packages from source code, with no repository in mind, and is not
> meant to be bound to a particular OS.
> For my use case, I keep my OS packages in prefix /usr, while I use
> sourceinstall to install packages from source code into /usr/local.
> So yes, the user downloads manually a source package, or checks out a
> source tree from a repo, then launches the installer on that package.
> It works for me and the class of users like me, but is not exactly the
> target of an installer for the whole GNU system.
> 

It could probably be made to work with GSRC quite easily then. With
GSRC, the user maintains a directories of Makefiles, which define the
means of retrieving, unpacking, building and installing packages. So, if
the user wants to install emacs, he/she'd type "$ make -C
$GSRC_DIR/gnu/emacs install". $GSRC_DIR/gnu/emacs/Makefile defines some
things specific to emacs, like the current version and where to download
the package and then it loads a master Makefile which automates the rest
of the build process; in the case of dependencies, those are
automatically resolved first. 

> This packagekit seems interesting but fairly (unnecessarily)
> complicated to me, and tightly bound to the whole gnome set of
> dependencies. Is not necessarily a bad thing, just not my personal cup
> of tea.
> Also, I am more efficient with C/GTK than with python/pygtk, so if you
> want the GUI to be in python, I cannot help much.

Oh, I'm not tied to the idea of doing a Python interface. I just
mentioned it as a way to bang out a quick prototype. As the primary
language of the GNU project have already been defined to be C, it's
probably best to do it that way (not to mention the smaller overhead of
writing it in C vs Python...). 

As for Packagekit, it's not actually completely bound to Gnome
dependencies; PK alone depends on dbus, polkit, sqlite and udev, while
Gnome-PK additionally only depends on dconf (only depends on gtk), gtk,
and libnotify (at least that's what they depend on on my Arch system).
Thus, a user can choose to install a) GNU source management alone b) GNU
source management + PK, or c) GNU source management + PK + [Gnome
KDE]-PK. It's up to them how much they want to pull in. Since I get the
impression that Gnome would be included in the canonical GNU system, it
would provide option (c) (in the hypothetical situation that we go with
PK)

> I guess the question is if you want the system to be only usable in
> the context of a whole, tightly controlled system (like for example
> the Debian or Ubuntu or Red Hat repositories + tools), or if you want
> to enable users of other arbitrary systems to make use of the GNU
> source-based package system as well.

I'm definitely not the correct person to make that judgment; better to
defer it to the "men upstairs". There seems to of course be a preference
to prefer what has already been written and contributed to GNU so
perhaps your interface would be more appropriate. As for me, I could go
either way, via your interface or the PK one, and I'm happy to help out
in either case. 

Like I said before, my main focus for now has to be getting the GSRC
repository back up to date but I can lend a hand with the interface in
any way neede.

Cheers,
Brandon