GoboLinux "focus points"

[rubyFeedback]

Nuc1eoN / fyrak1s, as well as sage-etcher and others, contributed to GoboLinux and improved various aspects of it in the last some months (sorry if I don't mention everyone, all names can be found elsewhere already such as the gobolinux homepage; this is just an intro to my suggestion here).

I believe it may be useful for GoboLinux to have some "milestone achievements" to focus on. This can be many - for instance, improvements to the installer-experience, to make it easier to install GoboLinux and run it, as a milestone. This step used to be very easy in the year 2005 (gosh, I am becoming old ...); since a few years I have had more problems with this step specifically. This also has to do with changing architectures, UEFI boot and so forth. Also the difficulty in finding useful documentation - google search has really gotten soooo bad in the last years. Grub also changed - I get it that it is more advanced than lilo, but lilo was so easy to setup .... Anyway.

One focus point I want to highlight here is ... KDE.

Back when hisham and the brasilian crew was in charge, around 2005 to 2007 or so, give or take, GoboLinux came with KDE installed. And it worked. I think it was KDE3 and QT3. Admittedly it was much easier to handle; I think all KDE packages were about ... 15 only or 20 or so. Not a huge number. Qt was also quite small.

Fast forward some 20 years. Qt6 is quite huge and KDE has a gazillion of packages. But, it is possible to compile them from source; I know that because I did so. It is a bit painful and requires quite a lot of add-ons (shiboken, for instance; took me ages to find out what that was ... did I already mention how horrible google search has become?).

In my local project I call "software manager", I track all those KDE projects. I also have old code where I can autogenerate gobolinux recipes; I have not really tested this for some years, largely due to the chicken-egg problem (need to test on GoboLinux but can not hd-install GoboLinux due to the installer problem, or then can not boot it properly), but the rest of that project I managed to improve regardless and I use it on any computer with linux. In the next days or weeks I plan another LFS/BLFS run; this already works fairly well. My goal is to eventually have a fully featured linux distribution from source - not yet GoboLinux, as for many reasons, including simplicity, I will favour /usr/ as primary prefix, but some programs I know work fine via versioned AppDir I'll also have installed. Anyway, back to the suggestion.

I would like to suggest that GoboLinux has some humble but achievable goals, perhaps yearly goals. These can be any goals - here I reason that we should be able to offer KDE for GoboLinux. I'd actually propose that this is made available by default on a .iso file too, or multiple .iso files, one for small GoboLinux, one fully featured; but ultimately this is not so important. People could download binaries or the qt6/kde6 stack I suppose from some remote host anyway. So the goal here would be a checkmark:

• Have KDE6/QT6 work and make available.

If binaries are not the primary goal then this could be merely GoboLinux recipes. I already track all kde programs and I use ruby scripts to automatically download new releases in a batch-manner, so for me maintaining this dataset is easy and not too much work. I use as primary goal .yml files, which are easy to modify (for me). Then I "expand" the entries there to an expanded yaml-dataset, containing the full information. This, as a next step, can be turned into SQL statements; in the next months I will be working on this as time permits, to have a full SQL database that also works with my scripts. But the core will always have a focus on .yml file and the expanded variant of this can be used by other programming languages too. I can also autogenerate shell scripts, this is all easily doable too.

My aim here with this post is to point to, what I believe may be useful, in having certain "reachable" milestones. We can then compare whether these were achieved, and then have a checkbox e. g. "GoboLinux now offers an up-to-date KDE6 experience".

I already use my own scripts almost daily, so as I am the primary user, I am also motivated to improve on it - as time permits.

(I can also distribute this code just fine, I did so back when I was using rubygems.org, but I retired from there when they added the 100k download threshold barrier; I can republish on github and/or gem.coop when the latter allows user accounts. If the latter does so, my goal is to start with a gobolinux team there, anyone who wants to have access and is known to have contributed to gobolinux will then be added, but starting with Nuc1eoN / fyrak1s, if he wants to and if gem.coop finally allows this too. My goal there is to simply help distribute ruby code I wrote; all will be under permissive licence too, be it GPL or BSD/MIT style, I don't care either way, but it is probably easiest to just use the same licence as e. g. Compile and other GoboLinux tool. https://github.com/gobolinux/Compile - by the way, I don't see a licence there. It may be best to have a licence tagged for each of the scripts on GoboLinux, this may simplify adoption because people can then simply check on the entry online.)