PeeWeeLinux Ideas

[Ralph Stickley]

Adi,
Sounds like some good ideas, some thoughts below:

> 
> Package Names
> -------------
> 
> Would it make sense to start adding a version numer similar to what RedHat
> does? Like creating thttpd-1.2.3-1.tar for the initial release. 

Sounds great, then maybe you could also just download a patch file to 
go from xxx-1.2.3-1 to xxx-1.2.3-2 (but these are binaries hmmm...not
sure about that)

> 
> File List
> ---------
> 
> If you look at the Embedded_Build directory, there is a file called
> Filelist (I think) which contains the package names and files associated
> with it. Would it make sense to keep a file like it, indicating the
> included package name and the related files?
> 

Hey, I did this as part of my pwl_update script. I go through the entire
packages directory and list every file into one file .root.list or 
something like that.  Very handy to help speed up the searching for 
a specific file...

> As one of the todo tasks I want to eliminate duplicate files in packages.
> 
Great! Thats one problem I'm having...trying to find a package for a file
and finding it in multiple places.  Also, the extraction continues to 
give errors when a file is duplicated...

> Subsequently I am removing those files from their duplicate places...
> 
> Should the Filelist file include the descriptions entered in the
> package.README files? I tend to not to include them to not clutter up the
> filelist file.
> 

Since pwl_config builds and maintains a list for "internal" use, you 
could put most anything here that would make it easy for people to use.
This could be rather time consuming to maintain, but any information
like this would be unique to Pee Wee Linux (I can't find docs for most 
of the other small Linux file systems :-(


> Maintaining the filelist file would make it easy to chack for duplicate
> files within the PWL distribution and to enable on to quickly find a
> particular binary, i.e. which package includes 'su'?
> 

BTW, A handy program I just started using, "uniq" will print a list of 
duplicates or a unique list from a file. For example:

cat filelist_A filelist_B | sort | uniq -d   

will list only the files that are duplicated in both lists. 

> Distributing PWL
> ----------------
> 
> I am thinking about creating a PWL packages directory on the server in
> which to keep all the packages for individual download. Perhaps gzip the
> packages, though. This would allow for individual packages to be
> downloaded rather than the complete archive if some packages are added.
> Also, it would allow for newly build packages to be made available
> immediately without having to wait for a new release.
> 

I think this problem is now being solved on some lists with CVS.  You
can check any one latest file or just give an update command to get
all the changes since your last update.  Or you can checkout all files
up to some version number.  Haven't been able to try this yet myself...

> I am a bit torn between the idea of creating a new release too often or
> not often enough. Just adding a couple of packes doesn't necessarily
> justify creating a new release, especially if some known bugs haven't been
> addressed. On the other hand I don't want to not release new features and
> additions because I won't have time to address some issues immediately. I
> need some guidance here.
> 
> Closing
> -------
> 
> This all comes to mind because I will have a crude X package compiled from
> sources soon. This will add some 40MB to the source distribution. I think
> it's a bit of a waste to have to download a 50MB file for some minor
> changes... I guess there's always the binary distribution.
> 

Ouch!  I think if the patch files aren't too hard to create, I'd love to 
just load the source from my Red Hat disk and do the patch.  Now my source
matches yours and I didn't need a big download.  Of course, you could
just order the Pee Wee Linux distro CD which has it all :-)

> TTYL,
> Adi
> 

More thoughts...

I've been thinking about all the dozens of little linux's out there and
how we could take advantage of all the work done for them. (Granted, most
are for different kernels, but that may be only a temporary problem).

What if:

Embedded_Build\packages        contains directories:
   PeeWeeLinux
   LinuxRouterProject
   LEM
   Toms_linux
   tiny_linux
   embedded_linux
   mobile_linux
   ...

One of the configuration options for a project would be to select the
distribution you preferr.  pwl_config could only work within that
distribution directory and you could try out different distributions.
Or you could pick and choose some files from various distros...

Of course, now the sources directory just went deeper too.
Maybe something to thinkabout down the road...


Later,
Ralph


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