Forked packages for OLPC

Jim Gettys jg at laptop.org
Wed Aug 13 14:27:01 UTC 2008



On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 14:28 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
> 
> > > ./NetworkManager/OLPC-3
> > we are using 0.6.x  there is work to move to 0.7 
> 
> Is this likely to be done in time for F10?
> 
> 

We have a version of 0.7, with the mesh changes merged.

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-July/016895.html

Dunno if Sjoerd has upstreamed the changes to Dan Williams yet; I've
pinged him asking.

Sugar will need patches for NM 0.7 in any case; Marco has been
threatening to spend some time on getting sugar up to date on Fedora
sometime soon.


> > > ./xorg-x11-utils/OLPC-3
> > dropped some dependencies
> > > ./sugar-evince/OLPC-3
> > minimal evince for the XO,  should be in fedora and pulled in from
> > there
> > > ./SDL_mixer/OLPC-3
> > Droped perl

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that for a more serious fedora
"conventional" desktop we're stuck with the footprint for Perl.  But
this will take some dependency analysis to figure out.

> > its a subset of csound for the XO,  we should make it so that csound
> > provides the minimal needs of OLPC

Yes, we don't want to carry a tk/tcl dependency, which, believe it or
not, is built into csound as a standard "feature", where csound programs
might do UI.  This is a very slippery slope for us; not only does tk/tcl
carry a substantial footprint in RAM and storage, but tcl's I18N
facilities are very poor and  we don't want people to be coding in this,
setting us up for localization headaches.

So we have a build of csound which is an exact, proper subset of the
full csound (thanks to Victor Lazzarini). 

The right thing would be to have both versions built and packaged in
fedora. I don't know who the packager is; Victor would likely need help.

> > > ./gstreamer-plugins-base/OLPC-3
> > needed to drop perl dependency there is one plugin that pulls in perl

Ugh; why a plugin would pull in perl is beyond me...


> 
> > > ./initscripts/OLPC-3
> > is needed 
> 
> Does it make sense to have an olpc-initscripts package that is in
> Fedora proper?

Probably, just for simplicity; but I don't think it really matters;
we'll have at least one additional repository, so it can live there.

> 

> > kernel should be branched and built in koji. currently its built
> > elsewhere.
> 
> Is there any work or hope of getting the OLPC kernel and stock Fedora
> kernel to converge?
> 

There is "hope".... But for the forseeable future we'll likely be
pushing on power management in ways that have need for a fork.

The hope is that a stock kernel might be able to install on an OLPC once
the OFW2 firmware is done (which has enough ACPI and other support to
maybe support the install path).  But for the forseeable future, the
kernel you run for more serious work will want to be a different
package.  See Deepak's mail.  Also, we should not carry the full device
driver packages for many file systems, many busses, etc.  The only
externally accessible busses are SD and USB.

Sorry about my slow response.  My house got struck by lightning Friday;
dead (to date): tivo, router, gigabit switch, 2 ethernet cards, one
light circuit, one cable modem.
				- Jim


-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child




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