A special linux distribution for developing OLPC applications

[Lex Spoon]

> Hey guys, we are thinking of building a new linux distribution
> pre-configured w/ all of the development tools for Sugar and Squeak.  The
> reason for this is that it is fairly complicated to set up Sugar-jhbuild
> from scratch and download all the development tools and documentation.
> Complicating this picture, broadband isn't a reality for most developers
> where we are (Nepal).  Building sugar-jhbuild from scratch will take
> days across a 56K line.


The APT tools should help with this.  You could use a base of a normal
distribution, perhaps Ubuntu, and then add your own APT repository
with the OLPC-specific packages.  OLPC developers would then add that
repository to their sources.list to get easy access to the current
version of the standard dev tools.

In general, distribution tools do sound like what you are looking for.
They are made for this problem, where you use mostly upstream software,
but some of it has some mods, and all of it has particular versions that
are appropriate, and so on.

The main downsides are (1) APT itself is a nuisance to set up (maybe YUM
or something else is better?), and (2) you'll have to make DEB package
files for each non-standard package you use.


-Lex