new distribution...

[johnnie ligotage <johnnie@ligotage.demon.co.uk>]

Hiyah all!

I was thinking - :-o - that I will try to put together a K[EG]MD v2 over
the next couple of months...

I need some help though. What I need to know is where all the source can
be found: stuff like MiNTNet, kernel, dare I mention it - audio device
0.9, W (if only I had access rights to Eero's sources via the web!!!) I
can find. The sources I'd like to get my hands is for other stuff such as
lpd, smail, elm, gcc2.7.2, stuff in /bin, etc, but for this kind of more
complex stuff, people 'tend' to only supply binaries. I'd love to know
where Knarf got the original sources form.

My angle is this...

I would maintain a similar structure for the new distribution as v1, ie,
basic.{tgz|aa,ab,ac,...}, compiler.{tgz|aa,ab,...}, etc but include
basic_src.{tgz|aa,ab,..}, etc.

All of this would be for 68000 machines. Then, there would be upgrades for
the various section that would provide 030/030+FPU/040/060 specific
binaries for people who have these specific machine types. These would
probably be limited to the kernel, compilers, and maths-intensive
application. We, the mint list, would identify what went into these
upgrades...

Then, as new versions of gcc become available, I'd add upgrade patches,
and eventually update the distributions.

Knarf's original install script could be overhauled, and add/remove option
implemented - am I starting to sound like a Bill Gates??!

To be entirely honest, I'm not a big user of GEM, so I would not include
anything other than AES 4.1, apologies to those that do, but there seems
to be a certain amount of work already happening on this front. That's
not to say that were somebody else to maintain a gem option, it wouldn't
or couldn't be included. There is already a GEM-init package that I have
tinkered with, but it's current file structure _seems_ to differ enough
from that of KGMD, that I haven't really persisted. Maybe it could be
brought into line with whatever KGMD turns into. (When I do run GEM, it
tends to be Geneva as that is more like Atari-GEM - in it's look and feel,
that ma@!c - and it always was F030 compatible...: I'd like to try
GEM-init/Geneva...)


So, what do people think? There's a fair amount of discussion to get
through first - I'm sure, but I'd very much like to see MiNT into the next
millennium. By the way, are we 110% Y2K compliant?

I honestly don't think that there is a hugely desperate requirement to
drastically change the file structure. Yeah, sure, we should probably put
stuff in sbin, and split the file system across different partitions - I
personally have /home on a separate partition, along with /var/spool/mail
and /usr/local. This way you dont loose valuable/personal/customisations
if you trash a partition... It would be easy enough to provide
documentation that describes the use of HDDriver/AHDI/ICD to achieve this
prior to the install...

I'll stop here and see what discussion this provokes (before the contents
of my brain gets sucked into this email).

Salut/.

J/.
__
John Blakeley
http://www.ligotage.demon.co.uk