Interested in the source code of other distros

Jon Stanley jonstanley at gmail.com
Sun Feb 12 20:39:11 PST 2012


On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:

> For Fedora, you can find both the code on various trac instances on
> fedorahosted( https://fedorahosted.org/web/ ), along with project less
> related to the distribution,
> The packages along with patches are on the git repository
> ( http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/ ).

Keep in mind that what's available on fedorahosted is just stuff that
Fedora has provided project hosting for - there's no requirement that
Fedora provide project hosting for everything used to make it (though
we do like to eat our own dogfood, as it were).

Some important projects for composing the distro are:

https://fedorahosted.org/koji/ (the buildsystem)
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=mash;a=summary (pulls packages from
koji and makes repos, no trac instance)
https://fedorahosted.org/bodhi/ (manages the updates process)
https://fedorahosted.org/fas/ (the Fedora Account System)
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=livecd (LiveCD creation tools, no trac)
https://fedorahosted.org/packagedb/ (the Package Database)

As you can see, putting together a distro is a non-trivial effort,
requiring lots of time and coding expertise (none of these tools will
work "out of the box" with anything except Fedora or a directly
derived distro). It's not something to be undertaken lightly.

I'm not trying to discourage you, but think long and hard that you are
*really* serving a need that can't be served by "standing on the
shoulders of giants" - using something that already exists as a base.
It happens that I think that Fedora, due to the completely open nature
of build processes and tools, lends itself very well to such an
endeavor. But I'm biased :)

-Jon


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