René Rebe

With the ongoing T2 System Development Environment efford, I wonder if we do not only build up an awesome tool to create customized systems and appliances, but also a more and more complete, generic Free and Open Source reference map.

The nearly 3000 (still increasing quickly) packages of T2 generically describe where the software comes from and includes meta-data like: verbose overview, author, license, supported architectures, kernels among others and the packages are not cluttered with branding or other unnecessary patching. The packages are left vanilla as the up-stream author intended it to be and only patched where needed to get the source code actually build.

The term “generic Free and Open Source reference map” mostly came into my mind when I noticed that we more often get packages that are not even listed on Freshmeat.net nor part of other major Linux distrubitions. And the T2 packages are just soo clean and lean, just take a look into one yourself, the just added ipmiutil for example :-)

To get a complete list just take a look at the T2 package matrix listing.

I think putting some efford to setup a search and browse engine around this meta data might really worth the effort, promoting it as uncluttered “Free software map”.

A last note: Don’t let other’s distributions high package numbers confuse you, in T2 the 3000 package number refer to one package for a single piece of software, and not like 4 or more in other Linux flavours, such as -devel, -doc, … So one would have to strip this split packages from the published numbers of other distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE or Debian when comparing raw-numbers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 13:49 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.