SEUL: Re: SEUL distribution?

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, David E. Scott wrote:

> Craig Sanders wrote:
> > why not pick a subset of debian as your base distribution? more than
> > the debian base disks but less then the full distribution. modify the
> > packages as appropriate for your needs.
> 
> 
> Excellent suggestion. For example, our Linux guru went thru the various
> FAQ's and found a way to install a fully working system on a 100M Zip
> drive! There even is a 10-20M swap partition and the rest is for the
> system. He set up a boot diskette and there it all was. Very nice.
> Something like that IMHO should be the goal of this "in-between"
> distribution.
> 

Actually, I think that is the plan.

Debian installs pretty plain-vanilla and gives the user a wide array or
choices such as several different MTA's, several different WWW servers,
etc, different X window managers (also installed with rather vanilla
configurations).

SEUL is going to install a more completely configured system with a
default MTA, a default window manager, etc. These will most likely have
more extensive default configurations that wat Debian installs by default.

Fortunately, Debian has made this easy with many packages providing hooks
for additional configuration options that can be "plugged in" to the main
configurations (one example being fvwm2 with its hooks files).

I am wondering if some mechanism exists for a debian package to be
"distribution aware" in that if SEUL could feed their defaults back into
the debian package, the SEUL defaults would be selected if the package
installation detected that it was being installed on a SEUL system or if
the user triggered a SEUL-default switch (either with an enviornment
variable or other mechanism.)

This might make it easier for a SEUL package maintainer to pick up
orphaned Debian packages and be able to handle both distribution
configurations or for a SEUL person to feed SEUL configuration options to
a Debian maintainer for inclusion in the standard package.


George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
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Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.