Freespire 2.0 released [LWN.net]

Freespire 2.0 released

Posted Aug 8, 2007 16:57 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

Well Red Hat tried to come up with a competition for APT rather than just use what was already built and working, and all the Red Hatters got suck with yum.

It doesn't seem to me that the distro space really is the place where you're going to see really interesting innovations anymore. It's not that people have gotten lazy, it's that that space is mature, so the only new distros are going to be adding minor variations to existing distros, like Ubuntu adding the cream (some would say, the fat :P) on top of Debian.

Not really

Posted Aug 8, 2007 17:19 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

yum allowed apt-like functionality to work with the existing Red Hat RPM packages. Had they gone with apt, they'd have had to change everything. (There was an apt-on-top-of-rpm, but it had issues of its own).

apt is still faster, and the two-step process (update the available package list in one step, do package updates in a separate step) has its advantages. But the yum in Fedora 7 is a lot faster than it used to be.

Not really

Posted Aug 8, 2007 22:00 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

Can anyone tell me why all package managers work with silly package lists that need to be updated all the time? Why not just query a package server for updates or whatever instead?

I think there's plenty of room for package manager and distro improvement, the problem is that people have way too low quality demands, considering they accept slow software way too often.

Not really

Posted Aug 13, 2007 11:21 UTC (Mon) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]

because a fancy querry method requires serverside scripting, eg php. this would make it much harder to find places willing to mirror your repos.

to mirror an deb or rpm repo all you need is rsync and an ftp server.

Not really

Posted Aug 14, 2007 12:22 UTC (Tue) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

That's not really true, there are other (file based) methods that can be mirrored.

And if doing a dedicated query server anyway, I wouldn't write it in PHP. The query server would be fast and light, no need for mirrors, one should be plenty.

Not really not really

Posted Aug 9, 2007 8:34 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> Had they gone with apt, they'd have had to change everything.
Not everything, just their age-old "20M all-in-one perl package" crud approach (which was due to update procedure rather being "rpm -Fvh *.rpm").

We at ALT Linux have come that way since 2001 (based on Mandriva which was quite a RH fork back then). BTW, considered distro forks happen when someone wants and is able to do something to the distro but upstream won't accept that for one reason or another (like RH's unwillingness for KDE due to Qt back then, or Mdk's particular braindamage with "shortened" locale names which just broke Cyrillics, among other cases).

> There was an apt-on-top-of-rpm, but it had issues of its own
1) there _is_ (google: lorg apt);
2) yes it does have issues but overall, much better than yum IMHO.

PS: yum wasn't even invented at Red Hat, it's "YellowDog Updater, Modified". I wonder whether RHAT folks would rather keep barebone rpm as the top of their package mgmt food chain...

Freespire 2.0 released

Posted Aug 8, 2007 17:09 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Yeah, freedom. But what about an efficient freedom? :).

A few points: You can't make people/companies work on what you want them to work on, that's the nature of freedom. 99% of the effort between debian, ubuntu, freespire, etc. is shared is some way so its not actually inefficient at all. The marketplace is big enough for different vendors to have similar products that are lightly customized for their own customer base and target market. Having multiple vendors work off the same base system, contributing work back and forth is very healthy IMHO.

This is practically the definition of NOT "reinventing the wheel"

Posted Aug 8, 2007 17:38 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

Ubuntu is based on Debian, Freespire is based on Ubuntu ... i wonder why everybody seem to be reinventing the wheel with each 'new' distro and don't try to innovate a bit. Sigh.

Um, you are contradicting yourself. Building on top of high-quality work that has already been done, rather than creating your own distro from scratch, is a perfect example of not "reinventing the wheel."

Innovation within distros

Posted Aug 9, 2007 4:20 UTC (Thu) by jhoger (guest, #33302) [Link]

I feel much the same way. Free software theoretically permits signicant innovation in the level of integration of hardware, applications, user interface, etc. because the source code is available. That should mean that the software is highly tailorable.

But what distros provide is essentially the editorial function and bugfix/packaging/updates service. Some minor customization of environment such as Ubuntu's Human theme, selection of default apps and some custom GUI management scripts are about as good as it usually gets.

OLPC and to a lesser extent the micro-distros like DSL and Puppy are examples of what I would prefer.

There shouldn't necessarily be less distros: just less look-alike distros. The problem isn't re-inventing the wheel... start with what is there, but innovate by changing and extending.

-- John.