Grafpup - Feedback requested

[jcoder24]

http://grafpup.org/news/?p=235

I have a question to put to anyone reading this blog. I had intended to recompile everything from source for the 3.xx series, but I’m thinking more and more of just syncing with Puppy-4.0. There would be a few caveats if I were to do so, like the fact that Grafpup will have a different package format, but it wouldn’t be hard to write a script to convert a .pet package to the new .tbz format I’m putting into action.

There would of course likely be some major differences, such as the kernel, but it would expand the pool of available packages for Grafpup. Well, it would expand the pool of packages for Puppy as well, because I usually keep the repositories a lot more full than Barry does. Not only that but it would make development go a bit faster and allow me to focus, as I have been doing, on desktop and usability improvements and advancing the state of the programs I’ve been writing specifically for Grafpup.

The upside to the complete recompile would be the chance to use newer versions of a lot of packages, and to select more options. We could possibly even have a Gnome desktop option. Plus, even if I use Puppy as a base there will be a lot of recompiling neccessary where Barry’s choices might differ from my own (for instance whether gtk+ should support svg). And if I did everything from scratch it might make certain things like localization a bit easier to accomplish because I would have the tarballs for the nls packages.

[BarryK]

For me it would be good if you use Puppy4 binaries as that would simplify dependencies probably, and I can just add your repo to the choices in the main PETget gui window -- with a builtin converter from your tbz pkg format.
If you could maintain a index file, kind of like the 'packages.txt' online, which will also have the dependencies in it, then PETget could download that to update its database -- like I currently have /root/.packages/livepackages2.txt and livepackages3.txt for the Puppy2 and Puppy3 repos -- for your repo there could be livepackages-graf3.txt..

[Nathan F]

I'm still working out a few details of the .tbz format but it's nearly ready to go "live". I'll try to publish a detailed spec sometime, but it may be easier for me to just go ahead and write a conversion script myself. There are a few differences in filesystem layout to be accounted for now such as icon directories but on the whole conversion should be simple.

For better or for worse I've done a lot of reinventing the wheel on this, but I'm very happy with the results so far. I think I can probably comply with the request for a package list at the main repos with dependency info included. That is if I sync it with Puppy4 after all. Would it be best to put it into the same time honored format that's been in use since Pupget? A possible issue might be difference in calssification (categories), which would have to be worked out. I guess I could account for that and just re-classify some packages for the downloadable list so they fit into what is in use in Puppy.

It should be noted this is a more long term goal right now. I just uploaded Grafpup-2.01alpha2, which is still based on Puppy2-T2. I plan to get that out the door within the next month and then the serious work begins on 3.0, which is the branch I was speaking in the blog post.

Nathan