Re: [cobalt-users] open raq distro

[Ryan Verner <xfesty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/01/2004, at 2:59 AM, Richard Siddall wrote:

> Greg Boehnlein wrote:
> [snip]
> > 4. The Cobalt UI (Aka OpenQuote / OpenRaq550) running on top of a 
> > RedHat or Fedora distribution.
> [snip]
>
> There's potential for a distro war here; everyone has their own 
> favorite, for practical reasons.

Heh, indeed.

> I recommend aiming for the OpenSSH approach of having a reference 
> implementation plus a porting group to handle the other base distros. 
> That way we can limit the war to choosing the distro the reference 
> implementation is based on.  (Debian and Fedora seem to be the 
> front-runners; I'm surprised no-one's advocated *BSD yet.)

Fedora is cool.  I've never been a big fan of Redhat, but I really do 
like Fedora.

Fedora has yum and apt-get.  Fedora, unlike Debian Stable, has up to 
date packages, and updates seem to be stable (although, I still want to 
wait until it matures).  I've actually been /really/ tempted to make 
Qbalt Fedora based, to be quite honest, but I'm sticking with Debian as 
there's things Debian can still do that Fedora hasn't quite caught up 
with yet, and there's Debian mentalities (userland, packaging) which I 
still prefer.  Fedora seems to have taken a /lot/ of lessons from 
Debian, though, and is heading in a different direction.  I'm watching 
the project with much interest.

That said, though, Qbalt *is* portable; the packaging system is also 
operated through an abstraction layer, meaning with a bit of work, it 
will be distro portable.  Right now, for example, I'm developing the 
interface sitting on top of an OS X box, which is pulling updates via 
fink (it's nowhere near production quality, but it's enough to test 
packaging with, as fink is dpkg based).  I'm not trying to get it 
running on OS X though; just doing development this way currently as my 
Powerbook's my primary machine at the moment, and Virtual PC is dog 
slow.

Back in April I had Qbalt running on top of FreeBSD 4.something, wrote 
a basic layer for it to interface with ports, and did have it somewhat 
working.  This was only a very simple test, and I didn't get any 
further on this.

That said, though, the concept of Qbalt *is* that it's an *entire* 
distro, and standardizing on packages is a huge part of it.  The 
interface is portable, but until the abstraction layers are mature, I'm 
sticking with Debian.  I don't want this to turn into another Webmin; 
it's an appliance distro, which means everything comes under the one 
wrapper.  Something to discuss later, I guess.

R

> Regards,
>
> 	Richard.
>
>
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--

linux.conf.au 2004 - Adelaide, Australia
             http://lca2004.linux.org.au/

"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."