Re: [GNU-linux-libre] review of uruk

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 21:36:36 -0400
bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Mar 2023 02:10:43 +0100 Denis wrote:
> > So if there is something related to chromium it will most likely be
> > in the PureOS repository.
> 
> yes - that appears to be the 'main' repository of pureos
> 
> FWIW, that alone conflicts with the FSDG "self-hosting"
> requirement - i believe that the consensus regarding that
> requirement, is that the distro must manage all of it's own
> infra, not to rely on the infra of another distro

As I understand, self-hosting has a completely different meaning here:
it's not about hosting your own infrastructure and it has nothing to do
with infrastructure at all.

The meaning here is closer to the one used by compilers: it means that
a software (or distribution) can build itself.

For instance GCC is self-hosting because you can build GCC with
GCC.

Replicant isn't self hosting because you can't build Replicant from
within Replicant (because building Replicant requires an x86_64
computer running specific GNU/Linux distributions).

The same applies to LibreCMC, and ProteanOS: nobody managed to build
LibreCMC from LibreCMC yet, and ProteanOS is meant to be really small
as I understand so that doesn't look possible either. And with a device
that has 8MiB of storage, it would be extremely difficult to install all
the dependencies necessary for building packages.

The issue here is that since these distributions cannot build
themselves, they needs to depends on another FSDG compliant or at least
on a fully free distribution (depending on the interpretation of the
FSDG), else you would need nonfree software dependencies.

In the case of both uruk and Parabola, they reuse packages from other
distributions. Uruk doesn't need to filter PureOS packages because
PureOS is FSDG compliant. Like all FSDG compliant distributions it can
(and even does) contain bugs. And bugs can be fixed by working with
PureOS directly.

In the case of Parabola FSDG compliance bugs can't be fixed in Arch
Linux so this requires some filtering / blacklist system that isn't
needed in Uruk.

And in both cases you can build Arch Linux packages in Parabola and
PureOS packages in Uruk.

For the later, the mechanism is actually integrated into the
distribution, so it's way better: you just need to make sure
/etc/apt/sources.list has the source repositories enabled and then
apt-get source can get the source and some command like dpkg
build-package (I don't recall the exact commands) can build the
packages you want.

As for Parabola, it lacks such mechanism, so users need to download the
Arch Linux package definitions from Arch Linux and not from Parabola.

Denis.

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