FSO Going Out of the Distro Business? - Questions

Stefan Schmidt stefan at openmoko.org
Wed Aug 5 13:32:04 CEST 2009


Hello.

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 05:17, Jeff Rush wrote:
> "Freesmartphone.org is going out of the distro business. We will
>  focus on the framework itself and will rely on SHR for building
>  a real distro and GUI around it."

That was me. So let's explain it a bit more.
 
> I got the above comment on a bug report I just filed and while I've
> heard it mentioned, I don't understand the ramifications.
> 
> 1. How will FSO -test- their stuff during development prior to a
>    distro picking up the release?  Don't they need a vanilla
>    distro for their own testing purposes?

Why would we need that? At the moment Daniel and me are using SHR unstable as
daily phone. That gives the framework a lot testing. We are also testing newer
versions of the framework or the new fso-abyss muxer within SHR on these phones.

So far this is working very well and we are happy that we can join forces with
the SHR guys on this topic. Way to much time and energy was spent on creating
images, feeds and other distro things while we could have spent this on the
framework itself.

> 2. If not FSO, where can I get a vanilla distro that -excludes-
>    most of the GUI apps and let's me install just that which I
>    want to use?
> 
> I've been using the FSO distro because it lets me start with a solid
> kernel + basic services and build up an environment just the way I want.
>  The other distros I've looked at bundle too much and make assumptions
> about the phone UI and PIM data storage that get in the way of operation.

That is a valid point. We targetted this one with our console and illume images
in the fso builds. As these both images are only a subset of the the bigger shr
images they should be easy to provide. I will talk to the SHR guys if it would
be possible to build these when they are building the others.

That way you could take a smaller image with the stuff you like and put on top
what you want. How does that sound to you?

regards
Stefan Schmidt



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