Emdebian is progressing really quite well, if I say so myself, and our second release of the Grip distribution (binary compatible with Debian) will be ready to be released alongside Squeeze. [0] There are other variations within Emdebian but these are mostly only at proof-of-concept stage; Grip is a proven distribution with users and contributors.
Emdebian Grip has ~2,000 packages this time (up from ~800 for 1.0 based on Lenny) and is available on a wider range of architectures. Packages are drawn mainly from the core of the Debian package set. We've developed tools explicitly to support Emdebian and some of these packages (like multistrap) are finding wider support in the rest of Debian. Emdebian has also been added to the Debian weather reports and is currently doing quite well there too. I'm wondering if there are ways of representing the link between Debian and the Emdebian sub-project within the packages.debian.org and packages.qa.debian.org pages. Possibly from the more general www.d.o pages too? Emdebian Grip doesn't use patches, there are no source diffs against Debian packages, binary packages have manpages, translations and documentation removed and a version suffix added in a post-processing stage. The differences between Emdebian Grip and Debian include: 0: Fewer, smaller packages, binary compatible with Debian - chosen for suitability with embedded installations. 1: only selected binaries from each source package are included, to trim unwanted dependency chains. e.g. the main binary could exist but the -gnome variant would be omitted to prevent the need to bring in GNOME dependencies - or maybe the mono dependencies get trimmed or maybe the Qt ones. (If someone wants those, the packages exist in Squeeze to setup a new mirror with a slightly different focus.) 2: Migration of binary packages to new components to limit the size of the Packages.gz files to be downloaded onto the devices. (Where Debian only has main, contrib and non-free, Emdebian splits main into main, debug, doc, dev and java then drops contrib and non-free.) 3: Separate translation packages for those embedded installations which actually might need to present translated strings from the base system. 4: Different architectures supported - packages are drawn from Debian for i386, amd64, armel, mips, mipsel, powerpc. sh4 is drawn from debian-ports. Work is progressing to add armhf and powerpcspe from debian-ports onto a second machine hosted by Hector Oron. Before Squeeze is released, I'd like to explore how Debian and Emdebian can be linked more clearly, not just in the release notes. It would be good to see the size comparison in the packages.d.o reports where the binary package exists in Emdebian and a comparison on the PTS of the version in Emdebian Grip. Things like this could help identify times when the Emdebian repository gets out of sync with Debian unstable (it takes a finite amount of time to post-process each binary package). The current packages are a few days behind Debian testing but I plan to resync this weekend. Emdebian Grip isn't really a port, it is more of a variant - there really isn't any need to put the full range of Debian packages into Emdebian. Indeed, I don't expect to grow Emdebian Grip much beyond the current 2,000 packages, even for Wheezy - at least not on the current server. I'm also looking for volunteers who could support the Emdebian archive with local mirrors to reduce the load on the current machine. (Standard mirroring tools should work, albeit on a pull method rather than a push, please.) Adding other architectures or different package sets requires a lot more space as the processing requires creating a local mirror of the relevant packages, space to unpack and process each one and space to host the final repository of converted packages. The current Grip repository at www.emdebian.org is 16Gb, one reason why other mirrors are sought. [0] http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ [1] http://packages.debian.org/emdebian-grip-server [2] http://www.emdebian.org/baked/ [3] http://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedDebianFAQ [4] http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianGripGuide [5] http://www.emdebian.org/release/lenny/grip/ [6] http://www.emdebian.org/release/squeeze/grip/ -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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