Moblin 2 and Fedora

Matthew Garrett mjg at redhat.com
Sun May 3 16:08:27 UTC 2009


On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 11:35:24AM -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> So I would like to really ask you and others to stop thinking of Moblin
> as "Fedora with changes" and measure everything against that. I realize
> it's easy to think that, and a lot of things just won't make sense in
> that mindset. 

I ended up analysing this while otherwise bored. There's nothing 
especially surprising in the moblin repositories. The large majority of 
the packages are Fedora derived, with a small number from suse 
(primarily the toolchain, as Arjan said) and a few custom ones.

Figuring out the proportion of the packages that were Fedora derived was 
actually surprisingly difficult. A large number of the specfiles have 
been processed through something called specbuilder. The behaviour of 
this seems to have varied between versions - some remove the original 
changelog, some don't. In some cases the specfiles are identical to the 
Fedora ones (to the extent of including comments) but have simply had 
the changelog entries stripped.

Using a few heuristics, I'd estimate that somewhere in the region of 80 
packages (ie, <10%) of moblin is from-scratch packaging by Intel. The 
rest is either obtained from Suse (gcc, cache, gdbm, gmp, osc - binutils 
is from Fedora, oddly), is identical to the Fedora package or is a 
simple mechanical transformation of a Fedora package, in some cases 
updated to a newer upstream as compared to the point where the moblin 
packages were forked.

Moblin includes some 2000 patches, and again most of these are derived 
from Fedora or Suse. Moblin-specific patches are mostly either backports 
or code that has been submitted upstream but not yet released. There's a 
few counterexamples (code that should be upstream but doesn't seem to 
have been submitted), but that's in the minority and certainly no worse 
than any other distribution. The rest are changes to defaults or UI 
alterations to fit in with limited screen resolutions.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, but right now it's 
kind of hard to see how moblin is anyone other than Fedora with changes. 
I don't think that puts Intel under any sort of obligation to feed 
changes back to us and I agree that Koji isn't ideally suited to 
producing the kind of derivative that Intel want to, but it would be 
nice to acknowledge the amount of the project that's built on the work 
of Fedora contributors.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org




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