May 20, 1998

Core/Layers Project announced: an announcement has been sent to several forums already, and several more are planned. The specification is an attempt at standardizing Linux distributions, but allowing them to continue developing as they wish. The spec only defines those crucial interfaces necessary to a functioning system, nothing more.

News

This group deals with the content of a SEUL "distribution". They determine how to organize the packages and integrate the products of all the other groups in the best configuration possible for the target user. They will work very closely with the SEG group to determine what needs to be learned about our target user to make SEUL a successful distribution, and will make direct use of that information to make configuration choices for the stable distributions.

In the first stages of development, the results from this group will influence the design of seul overall, such as the UI, and the making of decisions on what to include in SEUL as a priority because it is vital to the user, as well as what to exclude from seul, when it gets too difficult and is relatively unimportant to the user.

In later stages, once other stuff has been coded and is ready for filling out with configs targeted at particular users, this group will decide which users we want seul to support directly (home, business, school, marine biologist...), and define exactly what the configuration and options for each user should be, in order to serve them best. The actual specific configs will then be coded based on that info, which should be relatively painless if the other groups did their user-specific abstractions correctly.

What?

1. Working on the Core/Layers project
2. Work with SEG to get lots of info about our target user. Figure out large classifications of users we can target (home, business, school, and any other big ones that are discovered). Figure out what each user group wants, and any distinctly good/bad setup for any user group. Also, note commonalities among groups.
3. Decide which user groups we want to support, and the exact configs for those user groups (as allowed for by the seul configurability available).
4. Write the configurations, compile the distribution. And complain when SEUL configuration utilities mess up, so we can get them fixed.

Linux Core Specification

Another project that seul-dev-distribis working on currently is the Linux Core Specification, a "base" distribution specification from which other distributions may derive if they wish to be "Core Compliant".

Progress on this is well underway.

Tasks

The leader of this group is George Bonser (grep@seul.org). Please contact him if you are interested in volunteering.

Who?