[Mentalunix-developers] Read

[Clinton E. <men...@cr...>]

I've really been thinking about this for a long time now. After 
looking at the list of Debian project goals, and our project goals, I 
found something odd. 

Here is a list of our goals, with a '-' for debian not having the 
same goal, a 1-9 for how much it is the same as ours (10%, 20%, 30%, 
....) and a + for being the same as our goal: (the rating is at the 
end of the line)

Easy installer	9
- autodetects hardware +
- Graphical mode +
- text mode +
- Configuration for cd burners and other misc devices -

Standards Compliancy +
- FHS +
- LSB ? (LSB Sucks anyway)

Package Managment 7
- Support for all formats 2 (through alien, a messy way)
- Rebuild a full tree of source for any target with 1 command -
- Automatic Dependcy tracking + (apt has been around for a while now)
- Graphical Package Browser +
- Easy tools to make packages -

User Interface 9
- Complete Desktop Enviroment 9 (a few small differences, non major)
- Easy GUI Config +

System Administration 8
Self maintaining + (once its up, it stays up)
Tools to ease admin 5

overall 9

If you look at the things we differ on, they are stuff that can be 
implemented at the application level. Take Tools to do system admin --
 we could help with the push to debianize linuxconf and possibly 
write our own system admin tool. For the unified package manager, we 
could make mpkg a frontend to alien + dpkg (if it sees that the 
package is rpm, it will alien it, then use dpkg). I think it would be 
cool if the debian developers accepted stuff like mpkg to "replace" 
dpkg (meaning, you still had dpkg but stuff like apt called mpkg 
instead to allow for rpms to be installed). 

So, why do an entirely new distro, when we could focus on the 
application part of mentalinux, making a great distribution even 
better. It would probably get us more publicity and have more people 
willing to help out. So, now I lay out a plan that you can choose to 
accept or reject. This is a democracy -- if a majority wants to do a 
complete distro, then we will.


First, we need to find a server that is running debian, and would be 
willing to allow us to use its servers. We would need httpd,  
annonymous ftp, and some dpkg / apt stuff to set up the package 
mirror. 

All the packages we would package would be built against debian 
unstable (am I the only run running it? My box is really slow, so the 
builds might lag a few days from the source if it just me). A task-
mentalinux-core and task-mentalinux would be set up to provide all of 
our packages and just the core ones (mpkg and such). We could just 
start off by popping some early dev tarballs of each app until I get 
the hang of making debs (help me, trusty debian packaging guide). 

In addition to just the core apps, we would also provide some 
packages regular debian doesn't. As you might know, it is a bit 
difficult to get into debian (and more so now). So, we could let 
people on to the mentalinux project with less work (just ask, show us 
a package, talk on IRC for a bit, basic net backup check, etc). 
Mentalinux won't have to be a through as debian is, since we will 
have less developers and just focus on a few packages. That should 
make tracking down bad packages a lot easier. 

After debian woody its released, we can try to pacakge some isos with 
the mentalinux addon stuff, and mess with the post install part of 
the installer to allow the mentalinux config stuff to take place. 
Example: the user would install all the packages they need, then quit 
dselect, wait for the stuff to install, then the mentalinux config 
app would come up. It would allow the user to configure stuff like cd-
r drives and other devices the actual installer doesn't take care of. 


After we have proven that mentalinux has good things to offer, we can 
think about merging with debian. In the meatime, the ISOs and stuff 
that we would distrubute (after a new stable is released) would be 
Mentalinux-enhanced Debian GNU/Linux. I'm guessing that the woody 
freeze process is going to take awhile, which is why I'm aiming for 
us to release a stable release (althought maybe not 1.0 of 
everything) when it is ready for release. 

I know this plan is a bit incomplete. But, I'd like you to consider 
it. So, to make our own distro or to work on debian? It's all up to 
you (my vote is for, of course, enhancing debian)

-------------------------------
#indrema @ irc.openprojects.net
lamer.hackedtobits.com