What next?

[Mike Hearn]

On Thu, 02 Jun 2005 16:20:09 -0400, Paul Nasrat wrote:
> Getting people to the table for packaging architecture stack is going to
> be hard.  I'm certainly happy to talk to people, but there has to be
> serious enough interest on all sides. 

OK, I'm really glad to hear that.

Right now there is no such freedistro.org list. The idea has been kicked
around before, but nobody seriously stepped up to do it.

Rather than focus purely on packaging standards, I think it'd be better
for such a group to eliminate pointless differences between distributions
by producing a series of informal RFC type documents. I am meaning
differences like some distros supporting /etc/profile.d and others not, or
using different locations for LinuxThreads, or different ways of parallel
installing libpng.

That makes it easier to build packages that install anywhere reliably.
Attempting to de-jure standardise some packaging technology probably won't
go anywhere, the LSB tried that and it didn't work out too well. But by
smoothing out distro differences, making "standard" packages becomes a lot
simpler.

If there is genuine interest in this, I'll bump it much nearer the top of
my priority list. I don't mind trying to kick start such a forum, though
I'd appreciate the thoughts of Havoc Pennington on this though. I think
freedesktop.org just kind of grew out of the EWMH effort, but I wasn't
around at that time.

thanks -mike