DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: wish list for the new version, dsl 5.0

I think ideas like uclibc is good for discussion cos I feel there seems to be a sort of consensus that v5 might well be different enough to break away from v4- in many areas. However, veering away from the 'norm' is not neccessarily beneficial.

My dream would be for are generic extension type in the form of
tar.gz s. Media space is so cheap these days, I feel there isn't much need to mount stuff to save space. And the extensions could also be used on other linux-i386 systems and be easier to develop.
All extensions would be standalone, including icons, menus..etc.. in their own directories. They would not have to be loaded, just 'scanned'. So this would be a sort of hard disk type installation (except that there is no installation

).

Ofcourse there will be apps that can't meet that criteria, so .dsl loading needs to be kept. The thing I like about .dsl s is that they are really tarballs and can easily be shared with the rest of the linux community.

Also, the .info files for the extensions will be important because of the requirements they need from other extensions.

When I looked into uclibc and spent time daydreaming, I thought about a new format which would combine .info, menu, icon if any, and also be a freedesktop standard.
The .desktop files, which all freedesktop-compliant wm's use to create icons and menus.
The standard says any key that begins with X- is whatever you like, spec-compilant, and read only by the ones that want it.
Here's an example file:

Quote

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Gnuchess
Comment=A strong chess game
GenericName=Chess
Exec=eboard
Icon=/opt/chess/chess.png
Type=Application
Categories=Game;BoardGame;

X-extension-creator=Me
X-description= A nice app I think
X-description= will benefit the
X-description= DSL community

And it could be parsed for wether an icon or even a menu entry is wanted, etc.
Just another wacky idea

I recall that there were several discussions on uclibc. I would prefer (to keep) glibc mainly because it is the standard.

I gave this idea out sometime ago: the use of a lighter shell (i.e. in the place of bash in /bin/sh) could yield some results. This thread reminded me of it.

@hats...

Quote

4. Size comparisons

Shell In-memory size (kB) Binary size (kB)
-------------------------------------------
ash 472 97
bash 1400 533
ksh 1212 834
tcsh 1448 292
zsh 1472 424

All binaries were stripped. The in-memory size is obtained from the RSS column from 'top'. Sizes may vary slightly from system to system and also depending on exact shell version. I am actually not certain how relevant these figures are, but decided to include them for comparison. Another thing to keep in mind is that zsh uses a lot of modules that also takes up space, so the total disk space needed are higher than the above figure. The total zsh installation uses over 3 MB.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/OLD/shells.txt

I am mainly using tar.gz as the supported extension type. I am using a lighter shell. I am mainly using kernel+busybox+lua+fltk+jwm and not much more.

I am trying to be backward compatible with exsiting DSL, i.e., I have a gtk1.tar.gz which when mydsl-load'ed works. Then mydsl-load emelfm (gtk1) and dillo all works. So one could run a smallish gtk1 system.

The effort that the community has spent learning UCI, mountable self contained compressed applications, could still be supported only uncompressed. This being the case to provide an easier means to make and use, no read-only stuff, open to being used in other systems, and still have the advatage of low ram usage. I would even be interested in supporting other systems self contained application/receipies except as mountables But I think we have enough of our own community made to begin with.

To change or combine the info/icon/menu to a new standard would be an impact to the community. I of course could accomodate in tiny core - but think about the impact to exsiting users who wish to remain with 3.x/4.x. Of course, we could just abandon them, like the other distros have, and only look forward. Maybe that will happen anyway, not sure. Look at those who cling to v3.x. I am surprised that someone hasn't made an xtdesk.dsl for 4.x.

I cannot, as one person, offer and maintain, so many editions of DSL and then compound that with maintaining multiple "edition specific" repositories.

Tiny core is progressing nicely, I have renamed backup.tar.gz to mydata.tar.gz so that tiny core and play nice alongside DSL.

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