Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Holger Hans Peter Freyther]

Hey Guys,

I'm currently toying with creating a "minimal" uclibc image and while using 
minimal-uclibc I got several questions in #oe along the line claiming 
"minimal" is current unmaintained.

I have some questions to help me building a opinion regarding "minimal". What 
is the differentiation between minimal and micro, minimal and angstrom. What 
niche is minimal trying to solve? And is minimal the right name for it?

I hope you guys have some light for me
	z.

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Phil Blundell]

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 15:04 +0200, Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
> I have some questions to help me building a opinion regarding "minimal". What 
> is the differentiation between minimal and micro, minimal and angstrom. What 
> niche is minimal trying to solve? And is minimal the right name for it?

I think the old name of "generic" was probably a better reflection on
what I understood as the intended purpose of this distro.  That is, a
fairly plain system which imposes the minimum amount of policy
consistent with getting a working image.  As a result, what you'd get
would be more or less a vanilla Unix system, albeit a small one.  I
think this is still a worthy goal.

This is fairly different from the policy goals of "micro", which are
basically to produce an embedded system that's as small as possible,
with few concessions to providing a comfortable shell experience.  As a
result, the system that you get is less of a traditionally Unix-like
thing: it doesn't, for example, have the distinction between /usr/bin
and /bin since this is fairly meaningless if you just have a single
filesystem image.  Nor does it install a lot of the traditional
Unix-type utilities that are mostly or only used for interactive shell
sessions, things like "w", "mesg" and the like.

p.

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Hi Holger,

> I'm currently toying with creating a "minimal" uclibc image and while using 
> minimal-uclibc I got several questions in #oe along the line claiming 
> "minimal" is current unmaintained.

Not really, it's just falling under my temporary (until we have a TSC in
place) org.oe.dev boycott.

> I have some questions to help me building a opinion regarding "minimal". What 
> is the differentiation between minimal and micro, minimal and angstrom. What 
> niche is minimal trying to solve? And is minimal the right name for it?

Here's the story:

First, there was the "generic" distro -- an attempt to create a simple
distro config that builds for a few very common targets without
including too many policies, so that people could understand it and use
it as a starting point when they felt the need to create an own distro
config.

Alas, people misunderstood that, thinking that 'generic' meant it would
build for all targets and complained. To make it more clear that it was
about a minimal amount of distro policies, it had been renamed to
'minimal' (sic!).

A bit later, when Angstrom started to become the best maintained distro
in OE, I was worrying about the quality of our metadata. Angstrom
included many configurations that hided actual bugs in our metadata
(such as inconsistent versioning and bogus default providers etc.)
At some point of time, before Angstrom would be the _only_ distro that
built in OE (thus compromising an important distinction), I took the
plunge and refactored many (good) settings from Angstrom into generic
include and configuration files, so that all distros would benefit from
the toolchain knowledge that went into Angstrom.

There was the hope that eventually the Angstrom folks would realize the
benefit of that and would also move to more reusable config files. Alas,
due to the social problems in our community this didn't happend and will
probably never.

The question now is how do we move from here? We could rename minimal
back to generic -- in fact that's what it was for right from the start.

Whatever we decide on, it's important that we do not rely on one distro
to rule them all -- this will inevitably lower the metadata quality
hence the usability of OE.

Cheers,

:M:

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Graeme Gregory]

On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 08:20 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> There was the hope that eventually the Angstrom folks would realize the
> benefit of that and would also move to more reusable config files. Alas,
> due to the social problems in our community this didn't happend and will
> probably never.
> 

Don't we think its time for the Angstrom bashing to stop. Just because
we disagree with you on a technical level doesn't mean there are "social
problems"

Making the toolchain selection generic means that when you want to swap
toolchains on a DISTRO you have to test and rebuild all DISTROs for all
targets. It took us about 5 days to do the last toolchain test for
Angstrom (not counting the weeks I spent testing various configs before
we switched), I would prefer not to have to redo that test for everyone
elses DISTRO making it at least a months (6 months) work.

Graeme (XorA)

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Philip Balister]

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Graeme Gregory wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 08:20 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
>> There was the hope that eventually the Angstrom folks would realize the
>> benefit of that and would also move to more reusable config files. Alas,
>> due to the social problems in our community this didn't happend and will
>> probably never.
>>
> 
> Don't we think its time for the Angstrom bashing to stop. Just because
> we disagree with you on a technical level doesn't mean there are "social
> problems"

+1

Philip

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Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Am Mittwoch, den 08.07.2009, 09:09 +0100 schrieb Graeme Gregory:
> On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 08:20 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> > There was the hope that eventually the Angstrom folks would realize the
> > benefit of that and would also move to more reusable config files. Alas,
> > due to the social problems in our community this didn't happend and will
> > probably never.
> > 
> 
> Don't we think its time for the Angstrom bashing to stop.

It is. That's why I formulated this as diplomatic as my non-native
english language skills could do.

> Just because
> we disagree with you on a technical level doesn't mean there are "social
> problems"

We agree to disagree here. As you see this does not hinder me from
continuing to contribute to the OE ecosystem, but some relationsship
have received unrepairable damage. Not much point in denying that.

*shrug*

:M:

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Rolf Leggewie]

Hi,

let me jump in here and say that for the last few months, I've been 
mainly compiling against "minimal", fixing a few bugs in minimal and OE 
in general along the way.  I would not say this warrants to label it 
"maintained", but it's not unmaintained, either.  There is no doubt the 
existence of "minimal" has been beneficial to OE even lately.

Regards

Rolf

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Phil Blundell]

On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 08:20 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> The question now is how do we move from here? We could rename minimal
> back to generic -- in fact that's what it was for right from the start.

Yes, I think that'd be a good idea.  Or "vanilla" :-)

> Whatever we decide on, it's important that we do not rely on one
> distro to rule them all -- this will inevitably lower the metadata
> quality hence the usability of OE.

Agreed, certainly.

p.

Re: Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Am Mittwoch, den 08.07.2009, 15:03 +0100 schrieb Phil Blundell:
> On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 08:20 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> > The question now is how do we move from here? We could rename minimal
> > back to generic -- in fact that's what it was for right from the start.
> 
> Yes, I think that'd be a good idea.  Or "vanilla" :-)

I like that ;)

Regards,

:M: