Re: [MiNT] MiNT - Made By Internet Distribution

["Guido Flohr" <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi!

On Sat, May 22, 1999 at 11:26:59AM +1200, Mario Becroft wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 1999, Guido Flohr wrote:
> > This distribution should have a standardized directory structure so that
> > we have a common base to work on.  It should also be a goal to package new
> 
> Would the FHS specification which Martin Eric Racine always talks about be
> appropriate? I heard that he had already adapted some basic tools to
> support that.

There are several degrees of compatibility to FHS.  I think they are named
"compliant", "compatible" and "conforming".  For MiNT we have no chance to
be fully FHS compliant.  We need for example the non-FHS directories
/usr/multitos (/usr/mint) and - annoying enough - all partitions appear as
/<drive_letter> in the root filesystem.  Apart from that the FHS is ok for
us.

Another problem is the GEM stuff.  FHS is totally biased against X11.  My
proposal:  We take the X11 directory structure and replace all occurencies
of "X11" by "GEM":

	/usr/GEM
	/usr/GEM/include
	/usr/GEM/lib
	/usr/GEM/bin
	...

Maybe we can also think of a better location for RSC files than the
current directory.  What about this:

	/usr/GEM/share/rsc
	/usr/GEM/share/rsc/%L

where "%L" may be replaced by the language code.  Something like this ...

> I suspect that finding people to reliably keep up to date the various
> software packages will be more of a problem since there is rather a lot of
> software that must be maintained to form a complete system. I would be
> happy to maintain MiNT versions of some of the software I use, like
> mgetty+sendfax and cnews, so once everything is arranged just let me know
> :-)

With rpm things are quite easy.  As a starting point you can usually
simply grap the Linux rpm spec and adapt that by MiNT.  Since with rpm all
patches are automatically included and applied to the sources it is very
easy to update.  You only have to look if the patches are still valid and
can fully benefit from the work your preceders have done.

But I must admit that rpm - though very easy to use for the installer - is
a little hard to learn for maintainers.  But you will usually find a Linux
rpm which is probably close enough to MiNT's needs to start with.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000
mailto:gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de