Interested in the source code of other distros

[Enrico Zini]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 11:39:11PM -0500, Jon Stanley wrote:

> 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 :)

I totally agree with Jon. There are solid, universal distributions that
are completely yours to take, and that explicitly support[1] being used
as bases for derived distributions.

They are used (and tested) in all sort of systems, from embedded
hardware to cloud systems[2].

The universal distribution ecosystem is wide enough that you can pick
your favourite: are you familiar with the rpm world? There's Fedora[3]
and openSUSE[4] (and possibly more, I don't know the rpm ecosystem
well). Are you familiar with the .deb world? There's Debian[1] if you
want to be completely free, or Ubuntu[5] if you would like some more
structure on top of Debian.

Those are just the examples I know better, but there are of course also
the Gentoo and the Arch ecosystems, and the *BSD ones, and surely more.

I cannot think, in 2012, of a good reason to go through all the trouble
of starting your own ecosystem, and not to take advantage of all the
work that people have already done for you. It's a lot of work to do,
and the giants are friendly and have very wide shoulders.


[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census
[2] http://debtags.debian.net/reports/facets/system has an example of
systems where we know Debian is used. The package count for the various
categories is still low because those categories have beeen introduced
only very recently.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(operating_system)#Derivatives
[4] http://en.opensuse.org/Derivatives
[5] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives

Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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