Re: pkgsrc-based Linux distribution

[Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov%tut.by@localhost>]

>                       Hi list,

> I am curious if anyone has ever tried to build and run a system entirely 
> managed by pkgsrc, typically based on a Linux kernel (or alternatively, 
> with the bare minimum as the base, eg busybox/uclibc).

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bluewall
It is dead.  Bluewall's creator is still visible in pkgsrc's gnats.
Unfortunately, he didn't have commit bit, so his PRs were unfixed for
years. I guess this is one of the reason why this project died.

Another one. 
http://www.dracolinux.org/
I don't know its status.

> Someone just mentioned to me that it might be interesting to run this 
> standalone as a bootable media (CD or USB). I think it could be a nice 
> demonstration project outside of NetBSD.

I think full-featured general purpose Linux distribution based
_entirely_ on pkgsrc is a bad idea. Too much of work with no
profit. Much better approach would be to create additional _native_
(yum, zypper, apt) repositories for _existing_ and _popular_
distribution. For example, we can provide additional _native_
repositories for RHEL derivatives (ScientificLinux, CentOS and others),
I believe we can successfully compete with such projects as repoforge,
epel and some others. RHEL package collection is very small, so
additional >10000 packages will be valuable addon. Once again, it is
better to forget about our pkgtools/{nih,pkgin}, we should provide yum
repository for RHEL, zypper repos for SLES, apt repositories for Debian
derivatives etc. "Real" admin won't learn new package managers.

How to do this.

1) I don't like pkgsrc flavours and our recent project that provides
support for rpm and FreeBSD pkg formats. IMHO it is just useless because
in this case we loose such important things as bulk builders (pbulk and
distbb). Instead I'd do (and I plan to) the following.  With normal
tools (distbb and pbulk) we can build normal .tgz packages regularly
following pkgsrc branching politics. Then convert .tgz packages to .rpm
or .deb with a help of misc/epm. And then create yum/apt/zypper
repositories.

2) Obviously we should _not_ use /usr as a prefix for many reason.

3) In order to avoid rpmdb/debdb conflicts with existing repositories I'd
select special prefix for _all_ packages provided by pkgsrc,
e.g. nb-emacs, nb-mplayer, nb-zsh etc.

4) provide a package for integrating rc.d into native sysvinit/systemd/etc.

Another way is a special purpose distro like
http://openelec.tv/
Right now I'm working on VAAPI/VDPAU support in pkgsrc packages.

P.S.  I think the biggest problem here is to convert dewey notation to
rpm/deb notations. Dewey supports some things which are possible neither
in rpm nor in deb.

-- 
Best regards, Aleksey Cheusov.