On Tuesday 26 October 2004 21:00, Christoph Wiesen wrote:
> Sure I would like to say that Ark Linux or something similar would be the
> way to go, but reinventing the wheel over and over again can be a very
> overwhelming task.

We never reinvented the wheel (unless the installer is the wheel, which was 
necessary -- there was no other installer that met our demands back when we 
started (Dead simple to use, Qt based, works on pretty much all hardware)) - 
and even if we did, we're done with the wheel now ;) -- now that we're mostly 
done, starting an effort with the same goal is more like reinventing the 
wheel ;)

> I don't think ark is bad by any means (though it has 
> it's controversies like the thing they do (did?) with root because of the
> Windows-like nature)

Common misperception. We never did anything evil with the root account.
Our root account is locked by default, and there's a PAM wrapper that launches 
GUI config tools as root without the user noticing -- can't be exploited by 
evil scripts because the GUI config tools require clicks to do harmful 
things.
And of course if you don't like the config tools running as root you can 
configure it using the included kapabilities tool.

> All the necessary desktop components would come from the Kalyxo specific CD 
> and the user still can use thousands of well tested server like packages
> from debian - like samba and nfs and so on, that are of use on most home
> desktops as well but don't have to be re-done by the same team that does
> the desktop).

We thought about that when we started Ark, and decided not to take that route 
because it comes at the cost of not being able to tweak the stuff.
We want to be in control of the whole system because some stuff obviously has 
interdependencies - e.g. if you wish to hack Konqueror to have a 
right-click-on-directory -> "Share using Samba" option or something, you'd 
better have a preconfigured smb.conf that doesn't set any options that 
prevent this from working -- also, there's always the tradeoffs server 
centric and workstation centric distributions get "wrong" for the home 
desktop and vice versa (e.g. linking virtually everything to openldap, nis, 
kerberos etc. for network integration vs. saving valuable space).

LLaP
bero
 
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