On 25/02/2004, at 9:43 AM, josh wrote:
Actually, I'm very interested in this. I still want to see if I can run the 550 OS succesfully on my XTR but it turns out that Gentoo will run on every other system that I have access to: old Sun Sparcs, Apple PowerBooks, Windows PCs. This could have great advantages. Are you planning to port the Cobalt Interface or simply have a standard Gentoo installation on your server?
"porting" interfaces isn't half as straight forward as I get the impression most people think.
There's disadvantages in using a system such as Gentoo with a web interface, anyway. What happens when an application gets upgraded, and some option doesn't exist anymore, some configuration file changes format, some feature is introduced that fundamentally changes the way the interface works, binaries or libraries change format, parameters, or filenames, etc? It means massive, massive maintenance headaches for the interface developers, and everybody's interface randomly breaking until a fix is released. It's one thing I've struggled with on Qbalt; Debian Stable allows me to write static configuration files for daemons, and I'm almost certain they won't break, however, they /are/ rather old daemons.
For some of the stuff I'm trying to achieve, such as LDAP, things are getting interesting with backports, maintaining those, and such. I really do wish testing was stable, this would solve so many of my current headaches.
Releasing a project that "works" is one thing. Releasing a maintainable project that will be effective in the long term is a whole different bucket of fish.
R -- Signature space for rent.