Boots: a Fedora Remix

Foresight Linux is an offshoot of rPath. It uses Conary for package management, as well as other tools developed by rPath to create bleeding edge desktop distributions. Originally Foresight focused on GNOME, but later branched out to cover KDE and XFCE.

Things were a bit slow at Foresight recently, so Michael K. Johnson posted a "thought exercise" to the foresight-devel mailing list about a possible change for Foresight Linux to incite some discussion.

While Michael's proposal was not meant to be taken too seriously it did spark plenty of discussion, some here on LWN and more on the foresight-devel list, where a few people wondered how this discussion ended up on LWN. That's what we get for following -devel mailing lists.

What did become clear during this discussion was there was very little interest in rebasing Foresight, but there was interest in a Conary import of Fedora RPMs. This led to another proposal, to create "Boots, a Fedora Remix". Boots is a completely separate project, not to be confused with any possible rebase for Foresight. More information is available on this wiki page. The Foresight Council approved Boots as a sub-project on September 4, 2009.

Boots is mostly a binary import of Fedora, with packages modified or rebuilt from source as necessary. For example, PackageKit would be changed to use the Conary backend. There will be a full import of most of Fedora for x86 and x86_64 architectures. There will be no SELinux support or support for other architectures unless volunteers come forth to make it happen. Boots will comply with Fedora trademark guidelines so it will exclude trademark-related packages and use the secondary mark instead. Boots aims to be a good citizen in both the Fedora and Foresight communities.

While Foresight favors a rolling release model, some users have asked for a time-based releases. Some users have also asked for some server packages. While these have been outside of Foresight's scope, Boots will follow the time-based Fedora release schedule and include Fedora's server packages. A new version of Boots will follow each Fedora release and reproduce Fedora, bugs and all, while allowing users a choice of package management systems.

Boots users should note that while the rpm command will be included, using it could break your system. From the wiki: "the rpm command is on the installed system. If you choose to use it to install packages that conflict with Conary, you broke your system, and you get to keep both pieces."

rPath's distribution import tool mirrorball will be used to import Fedora packages into the boots.rpath.org repository. rPath is currently using mirrorball to maintain up-to-date imports of SLES 10, SLES 11, CentOS 5, and Scientific Linux 5 as maintained platforms, as well as Ubuntu Hardy as a proof of concept. Note that these are all server versions. Boots will be the first desktop distribution (after Foresight) to use the Conary package management system.

Boots packages will use the Fedora toolchain to maintain binary compatibility with Fedora. Foresight may or may not use the same toolchain, that is another discussion. Nonetheless, bleeding edge packages in Fedora may be rebuilt for Foresight. In any case Foresight can renew its focus on providing the latest desktop developments and allow Boots to focus on any server package requests and the time-based releases that users have requested.