Douglas Thrift's Blog: Holy Roman Empire

A collection of random thoughts, commentary, and crazed opinions.

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Thursday, September 7, 2006

Tags: dooom, freebsd, lab, linux, software, subversion, unix, world

At some point in August I decided that it would be fun, useful, and maybe even a good idea to create a Linux distribution of my own. Several factors led me to this horrifyingly insane epiphany including Gentoo Linux and its package management system's general slowness and suckitude, ArchLinux and its simple (possibly to a fault) and fast package management system, FreeBSD and its general wonderfulness which every Linux distribution that I've seen lacks, the horribleness of udev combined with nss_ldap which makes the lab Linux boxen take forever to load in some cases, strange happenings possibly related to nss_ldap which make bash useless for anyone trying to use Broadsword, and the fact that the lab cluster (Épeé) has been sitting off in the corner for about a year. Also I was reading Linux from Scratch.

So, yeah, I decided I would make my own Linux distribution. This Linux distribution would not have a name, but its package management system would be called Charlemagne after the Holy Roman Emperor of the same name and would be thrown into the top secret project HRE which aims to make some sort of Unix like operating system at some unknown point in the future possibly before the GNU Hurd is a stable and useful operating system. My main scheme for Charlemagne is to have system similar to FreeBSD's ports and also similar to ArchLinux's pacman that takes advantage of lessons learned from all of the package managers listed earlier and also takes advantage of Tim Kientzle's libarchive which he actually developed to improve FreeBSD's package management. So far I've built up a good deal of the ports side of Charlemagne in bash (except for dependency chain stuff) and have a good set of packages for what I consider to be a base Linux system. Rather than using a plain old tar file or a GNU tar file, Charlemange uses pax tar files (pax being the POSIX standard for a spiffy tar file) because it supports cool things such as POSIX ACLs and extended attributes and it is supported by libarchive. And, on that topic, I believe that this might just be the first package manager to take advantage of such things and the first Linux distribution to make their use mandatory; mostly because I believe ACLs to be just that cool.

So, you're wondering, where can I get this wonderful Linux distribution and package manager that you haven't finished yet? Well, you can look for it under Subversion where you can check out http://svn.douglasthrift.net/svn/hre/charlemagne/ or view it with ViewVC controversial Apache License 2.0 and all.