Re: [MiNT] Sparemint announcement

[Martin-Eric Racine <q-funk@megacom.net>]

> most of you have probably heard about a secret thing called 
> Sparemint that has been worked on during the past couple of
> months.  The time has come to "reveal" the secret. ;-)

Congratulations! ;-)

> Sparemint is *not* (yet) a replacement for KGMD because in
> order to benefit from it you already need a working MiNT
> environment (at least a minimal one, maybe bash alone 
> will already do).

I have tried your RPM port and some packages, and it's a
lovely base for building a distribution, especially using
RPM as a package manager.  I definitely intend upon using
it for my distribution, as recommended in your docs.

Again, congratulations! ;-)


> Sparemint is rather a software archive.  

And this is where I stop:

Several docs on your site imply FHS compliance, even though
most packages follow the older FSSTND standard.  MAN is one
good example of this:  you put pages in /usr/man and cache 
them in /var/catman instead of the correct /usr/share/man
and /var/cache/man.

IMHO, if someone is gonna upgrade the filesystem hierarchy, 
one might as well be 5 years ahead of others rather than 5 
years behind, so why not go the FHS way, all the way?

> Hm, what else should I say?  Just have a try and visit the
> Sparemint site.  And please have your credit-card at hand.
> ;-))

Does my video club card count? ;-))

> Just kidding.  No, all software you can get on the Sparemint
> site is free, no share/fair/trial/demo/payware.

Remain aware that most packages you distribute, GNU ones for instance,
specificaly require that one includes the original source, while others
explicitely forbid binary-only distribution of ported sources, and
others require a permission from the author before any port can be
distributed legaly.  Reading each package's license is important.

Nonetheless, this RPM port, new library and binary format are all
steps in the right direction.   Again, congratulations to Frank
and Guido for a well-designed system.

Now, if I could only convince everyone that FHS is good for MiNT...

-- 
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Martin-Éric Racine            The Atari Stacy and TT030 Homepage
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