Re: planning for a GPE release

On 31 May 2002 10:40:45 +0100
Philip Blundell <pb@nexus.co.uk> wrote:
> So, I think GPE now contains a reasonable amount of usable software.
> Perhaps it's time to think about integrating this into some kind of
> coherent whole and making a first release of the whole suite.
>
> Nils, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, definetely!
Though I am still, due to my sickness, bound to hospital without internet connection, so I will not be able to contribute much to it until the beginning of July :(

What I would like to see in a release is not only correct packages, i.e. packages of all the stuff we have that install and work correctly, but also some modified packages from Familiar.
Why?
Because I think Familiar is very nice for development guys like us but much too bloated for users. And GPE aims at users not developers (at least in the long run). If you install a default Familiar with all the packages you need to get GPE running you will soon find that 16MB Flash are not very much! Or in other words your Flash will be almost full after install.
I have started to tailor it down a bit by for example making extensive use of BusyBox. Using Busybox also required to modify some scripts because they rely on the GNU version of some utilities like sort, tail, head and so on, etc... Then I would also like to start including all those small misc fixes and modifications that can mostly be found in the Wiki, e.g. the USB networking hotplug scripts. This is really convenient! Just plug in your iPaq and you have instant network access.
All this together could then result in a first distribution. Oh well, maybe start step by step and first package all the GPE stuff up ;)

Anyway, again thanks so much to everyone contributing to the project!
I think we have found a very good approach and had a very promising and good start.

> p.
CU
  nils

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