[gobolinux-users] Flavour proposal

[Benjamin Bruheim]

Hi,

Since I installed gobo I've had this little idea in the back of the
head, but I could need some help formulating it properly

Gobo installs recipes directly from sources, and with that it does no
further modifications but to make it work. Packages are again nothing
but precompiled recipes (afaik) so no modifications there. Some
packages do require a little modification after installation to
perform as you want, but this is not the job of gobo cooks.

And it occurs to me that Gobo as it is installed has a little flavour.
Good console configuration. A neat startup. A centralized environment
storage.

As times goes on, perhaps other ideas would come to frution. Such as a
desktop neutral configuration utility with its requirement. A final
solution for the soundserver/alsa-war (which is my pet peeve). A
perfect dbus-setup for us with lots of usb-devices. The list goes on.
But all these things are neither packages or metapackages. They are
basically configurations done to different parts of the system. This
way we could create "tips" and make them installable in the same
procedure.

So far the solutions to configuration problems have been creating
centralized configurations (like gconf), or centralized configurators
(like those web interfaces for configurations whose names I've
forgotten). But still you need to read a lot of howtos and what not to
do these things. It is just abstracting the problem away into a new
problem requiring further knowledge to get problems solved.

So get me right.  I am not proposing that we do this right away. I
just want a little input wether this is a step in the wrong direction.
For example, a lot of the stuff I mentioned above could go into
recipes instead of creating an entirely new format. For instance
making "DRI" working is a matter of changing the Recipe of Mesa.

I tried writing up an example of a Flavour fileformat, but it easily
gets too complicated and un-gobo. The simples "mode" would probably be
patching and simple scripts. For added safety they would have
manifests (filelists) and automated verification and backup steps.

A target with a flavour could be assorted preconfigured desktops, such
as a hackers delight lightweight xfvc or a retrofuturistic rox.
Another target could be properly configured super-emulators (since
configuring those front-ends is hard).
Or anything that interests whoever reading this. I just love gimped
out media players etc. :)

But perhaps I only think Flavour is a logical addition to Recipes? ;)

sincerly,
Benjamin