water cooler :: dsl roadmap?

In theory, this would be nice. But in practice there would be too much overhead with all of the cloop devices that were mounted.

Since I am happy with the bloat-level (or lack thereof) of the base livecd, I am OK with the status-quo and use UCI for some of the additions.

I see what you're saying, but i was thinking of the not-so-near future. Eventually there will be no need to support 200mhz machines because there will come a time when they no longer exist. Cloop devices won't necessarily be the best compressed filesystem a few years down the road either. Then again, GNU/Linux might not be the best operating system available in 10 years, either =o)

Quote (mikshaw @ Aug. 22 2005,22:09)

I have a notion that shaking the CD would bring unpredictable results, which is why the myDSL system is there in order to add a decent amount of additional software.
I think a good step forward would be all applications in a totally modular system....plug in an application you want to use and unplug it when you're done with it. Since file size will eventually not be an issue, all dependencies for each program are included with that program and separated from those of every other program. UCI is a step toward this, but i think it would be ideal if DSL could be mainly hardware detection plus GNU utils and some essential scripts...everything else would be mounted.

What your describing sounds a awful lot like klik (used in Knoppix). It uses cramfs compressed .cmg application packages. To run an application you double click on the .cmg file and it mounts the package and runs the application. When you've finished running the application the .cmg file is unmounted. Any libs not present in the base system are included in the .cmg application packages so there should be no dependency issues (although it's also very inefficient as you might have copies of the same library present in a number of application packages when on a normal Linux system just one copy would suffice).

klik came after our ci and uci modules. In fact when it was announced on knoppix.net there were posts saying so. klik is to kde what uci is to our fluxbox system. We had have mount and unmount apps for a very long time. DSL will remain a small set of useful desktops apps. There are no plans to strip it down to the metal. The uci system, just as the base.iso will continue to improve and grow in featues. Remember, we don't have tens, hundreds, or thousands of developers, nor do we have millions of dollars behind this project. Yet, with our nearly monthly releases, I believe we offer unique and interesting features. We are not just a collection of binaries. You will have much to look forward too.

Sweet.

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