[Freedombox-discuss] A software architecture for the FreedomBox

[Bdale Garbee]

On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:06:46 -0500, Charles N Wyble <charles at knownelement.com> wrote:
> Yes of course. You are absolutely right. I was thinking of having the 
> stack be remixed, but I like your idea of having a base stack and then 
> folks deploy on top of it via some sort of "app store" interface. The 
> main reason for having a stack that gets remixed is that it would let 
> you know everything works together.

This is exactly the experience that Debian already provides.  All
software is packaged, packages can be installed and removed as desired,
and the packaging includes strong dependency management.  And shared
libraries are versioned and multiple versions can be installed at once
if needed, so different daemons can easily be updated at different times
without the need for virtualized containers.

I'd suggest anyone working on Freedombox who doesn't already understand
how Debian's packaging system works spend some time learning about it so
we don't end up reinventing things that already exist...

With respect to an "app store" interface, a number of projects over the
years have put different user interfaces on how Debian packages are
selected.  The first I can recall that used an app store / shopping cart
metaphor backed up by web infrastructure was Lindows, which got renamed
and then acquired by Xandros if I recall correctly.

To make real progress towards delivering a reference implementation, we
need to focus attention on mapping feature desires to package names, and
the generation of wiki-documented recipes for configuring said packages.
That's the information we need to get together now, regardless of what
the ultimate configuration user interface looks like.

Bdale
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