RE: [Devil-linux-develop] Re: getting picky about what software is included?

[Dean N. <di...@ti...>]

I get up a little late, and look at all of the discussion I miss!

>>Bruce Smith wrote:
>> General question (not necessarily directed toward UPnP):
>>
>> Do we need to start getting picky about what software is included?
>>
>> One of these days in the not so distant future, the DL ISO is going to
>> become too large to fit on a single CD.  In my experience it's much
>> easier to reject software requests now, as opposed to removing software
>> later to reduce the size. (at least we won't piss off people as much :)
>>
>> Or maybe we don't worry about it, and when DL doesn't fit on a CD any
>> longer we start building different ISO's?  (firewall edition, mail
>> server edition, web server edition, ... stupid software edition :)
>
>As it is now I think the only way is to create different ISOs
>as we already have stuff that should no be on a firewall but
>are perfectly fine on some intranet server.
>
>> Or maybe DL goes DVD-only after it surpasses the 650/700MB limit?
>
>Looks like we are currently heading in this direction.

While I am concerned about the amount of software that we keep adding, I
will point out (probably to my detriment) that other distros (like Knoppix)
do a compressed ISO image - and that is how they fit over 2 Gigabytes on a
650MB CD.

>> As I said, I'm not picking on UPnP.  I haven't read about it yet, and
>> don't really understand what it is.  This is just something I've been
>> wondering about for awhile ...
>
>I think we have to make up or minds about what Devil-Linux should
>really be. At the moment it is some kind of "everything-and-nothing",
>more like Knoppix but just for servers, not for desktops.
>

To be honest, when I started using Devil-Linux - I thought I was getting a
stripped down, securely built, grsecurity enhanced firewall.

>I'd really like to have a Devil Linux Firewall Edition that I would
>use on my firewall.

I STRONGLY support that.  Of course, whether we could agree on what needs to
be on it... (IPTables, DHCP client, and Postfix would suit my needs - unless
I can get ClamAV and SAGATOR to work as well).

>So what are all the other people on this list thinking about how
>Devil-Linux should proceed in the future?

As a thought - maybe in addition to the build system, we could develop a
tool to create the ISO image from a .bz2 file (or multiple .bz2 files) based
on a menu.  I.e, I go into a menu, select IPTables, DHCP client, and Postfix
and the program/script creates a temporary directory, unpacks the
"Devil-Linux" core bz2 file, unpacks the DHCP client bz2 file and merges it
into the temporary directory, unpacks and merges the Postfix bz2 file, and
then creates an ISO image out of the whole thing.  This is different in how
we do things now in that I am not suggesting that anything needs to be
recompiled - just assembled.

As we talk about this, lets consider the extreme case - the gentleman who is
trying to run Devil-linux over at the web cafe.  We have gotten several
feature requests from him (L7 rate shaping, UPnP, etc.) that would probably
never fit into a standard "profile".  So, instead, we need to give him an
easy way to create his own ISO file (and I am suggesting that the current
system of compiling everything isn't an easy way).

Dean Nedelman
TimeLord Consulting