Better packaging for older hardware?

[Tom Diehl]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003, M. Fioretti wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> As some of you may already know, the RULE project (see my signature)
> works to make the latest stable release of Red Hat useable on very
> low end hardware (i386+ 16 MB+ RAM, 3/400 MB hard disks).
> 
> This is not an academic exercise: students and schools in developing
> (and "developed") countries often have only 5/6 years old computers
> from donations, without money to buy more parts for them, when those
> parts still exist.
> 
> To have an idea of what we do in RULE, please have a look at our
> website, maybe starting from these very short pages:
> 
> http://www.rule-project.org/en/faq.php (please start here!) 
> http://www.rule-project.org/en/what_can_rule_do.php
> http://www.rule-project.org/en/sw/kdrive.php
> http://www.rule-project.org/en/news/vumbox.php
> http://www.rule-project.org/en/news/state_of_the_rule_200310.php
> 
> 
> Now to the actual issue. RULE will now switch to Fedora. Since this is
> a community based project, we hope that the issues addressed by RULE
> can receive more attention than a corporation could afford (this is not
> a critic to Red Hat: a company must make ends meet and produce money,
> no question about that).
> 
> We are not going to ask that the whole project is turned upside
> down. There are a few things, however, that would make the life of
> RULE school and private users a whole lot easier, and be almost
> transparent to other users.
> 
> I refer to building:
> 
> 1) kdrive RPMs whenever the XFree86 ones are updated.
> 
> 2) i386 kernel RPMs, possibly tweaked for low RAM.
> 
> 3) (this is maybe the most important) single RPMs of several user
> friendly desktop applications.
> 
> Practical example: a lot of RULE end users will be non programmers
> without any prior PC experience, and they will only need email, web
> browsing and to do simple homework.
> 
> They would have real problems to use mutt, no possibility to run a
> compiler, no skills to do it. Their ideal solutions would be to have
> fedora RPMs to install (just as an example!!!) ONLY Kmail (or
> sylpheed), Gnumeric or KOffice, Konqueror... without any other
> applications and/or the most advanced/cool features of Gnome and
> KDE. On plain X or Kdrive with only Qt / Gtk and a basic WM like Ice
> or blackbox.
> 
> With respect to the KDE case, if there were (with the same builds,
> from the same source RPMs already available)
> 
> kmail.rpm
> konqueror.rpm
> 
> and the current kde packages, which are actually monolithic bundles of
> much more stuff, became "meta-packages" which just require the single
> things, situation would be:
> 
> much much better for RULE users, no more forced to trash a computer
> because it won't fit "hidden" apps never needed.
> 
> almost transparent to power end users: they would continue to
> install/update as usual "kde desktop", "gnome desktop", and so on,
> without ever noticing what happened below.

IMHO it is bloat. I thought the idea was to reduce the size of FC. See below.

> What do you think?

Sounds like something for fedora extras once that is setup. Since Red Hat is
still controlling the devel on FC I do not think it would get in there and
as long as someone wants to maintain the packages I do not see a problem with
that. If the RULE project is already maintaining these packages they could
simply be moved to FE, IMHO putting an i386 kernel etc in the main FC distro
would be a waste, but that is just me.

-- 
......Tom		Registered Linux User #14522	http://counter.li.org
tdiehl at rogueind.com	My current SpamTrap ------->	mtd123 at rogueind.com