Using the Donor Repos in Woof-built Puppies

[playdayz]

From coordinating Lucid I have seen that people would really like the donor repos to work better than they do for installing programs from the Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian repos, etc. This was one of Barry's goals in building from the Ubuntu, for instance, binaries in the first place. In Lucid my estimate is that perhaps 1/3rd or a bit more of the programs in the Ubuntu repos would install and run correctly--mainly the more simple programs. That's not bad, but users don't know which ones will work and so they are bound to be disappointed more often than not. The basic problem is that the Puppy infrastructure is different than the Ubuntu infrastructure--that is why Lucid is not a Ubuntu clone--we use the Ubuntu binaries with the Puppy infrastructure. So Ubuntu makes assumptions about what is there that do not necessarily fit Puppy, and some programs don't work. It is desirable that they do work, because software availability is a huge contributor to usability.

Here's my idea. If people could test the programs in the donor repo, then someone could compile those programs that work into a new PPM index that would show only the donor distro programs that have been tested. This list could be put into the PPM. There are a lot of programs of course, but if a few people tested a few programs every day, that would add up fast imho. People would naturally test the more interesting programs first. This is not necessarily a suggestion for Lucid--in my opinion the work would be better off applied to a newer version.

[666philb]

hi playdaze

this is a really good idea.... it's a shame we all didn't do this when lucid first came out.

i agree that about a third to half of the apps from the ubuntu repos work well on lucid. The main ones which don't, being things that require the gnome or kde desktop environment , and of course the dreaded python!!!

and there's a lot of stuff that people don't think works, as it doesn't get a menu entry, or is missing a lib. which are easily solvable.