Lunar + Mint

[Duncan Gibson]

If I understood correctly, Marek suggested:
> [... building Mint on top of Lunar ... lots of details snipped ... ]

Wow! Marek, you certainly arrive with a really big idea, though
I'm not really sure whether it's an idea for Lunar or for Mint.

If I understand you correctly, you would like to have a live CD
with a full desktop interface, which can then be installed to disk,
but that further updates would involve compiling from sources.
That's not such an outrageous idea, and it has been tried on Lunar.

The 1.6.1 ISO broke with the tradition of a minimal installation
that could be configured for either server or desktop use by also
providing pre-compiled versions of XOrg, Xfce, firefox and one or
two other key packages. The idea was to make it easier for users,
especially non-power users, to be able to install a desktop without
spending two days compiling things before being able to judge if
Lunar would be suitable for their needs. What we found was that it
took an awful lot more time and effort to be prepare, build and
verify the ISO production process, and the Lunar development team
was really too small to be able to commit such resources to it[*].

As a result, the following ISO went back to basics, and provided
the minimal installation system again, partly because it took much
less effort, partly because Lunar is a rolling source distro and
the desktop packages change pretty quickly so everything would need
to be rebuilt anyway before too long, and also because many users
had chosen Lunar for their server infrastructures and didn't want
to have the unnecessary packages required for the desktop anyway.

So that's the status at the moment. The Lunar development team is
small and doesn't have the time and resources to keep producing
the up-to-date ISO releases required for a liveCD with installable
graphical desktop environment. I know there are one-man distro's
out there that manage to achieve it, but I don't know how they do.

The Lunar development team needs to attract some new and active
members (preferably ones without real-life commitments :-) before
being able to embark on such an ambitious project as you have in
mind. I know that people have commented on #lunar about porting
the lunar package management tools to run in other distro's, so
it is definitely possible, but full integration would need work.

Having said all that, maybe you could outline what steps you feel
would need to be put in place in order to use Lunar as a basis
for another distro, not necessarily Mint. Maybe these steps would
be interesting for the general improvement of Lunar anyway.

Cheers
Duncan / engelsman

[*] If you have been following Lunar for a while, you might be
aware that there has been a new ISO in preparation since January,
but time, resources and real life seem to get in the way.