Submitted by After a bit over 20 months, work on ROCK 3 has been completed. ROCK is a Distribution Build Kit. This means it is a tool to create and maintain GNU/Linux distributions. With a few keystrokes and some patience, you can have a generic distribution up in a short time. With some more work, you can adjust its package selection. With the help of freshmeat and the power of autotools you can add new
packages in a heartbeat. The ChangeLog is available and the Roadmap for ROCK 4 is already there, too.
Well… i had a look at the tool… Its a WOW kinda tool… People here may use your own disto, complete customization and sharing your exact distro with someone else.. what more naming the distro by your own name! Simply awsome… its like dream come true for many people!
well I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s a dream come true. After all it basicaly means that I have to do pretty much the same task that the whole debian/ubuntu or any other distro team does ALL BY MYSELF. Regardless of how grand this might sound I don’t find it a dream come true in any way. Man maybe you should get a job or something if you really have that much free time.
The T2 project – that is originally a Rock fork – seems to have even more ambitious and flexible distribution build system:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=t2
http://www.t2-project.org/
For example (from their info): “Currently, the Linux kernel is normally used – but we are expanding to Hurd, OpenDarwin and OpenBSD; more to come.”
Anybody has experience of them and can compare them to each other? Or compare them to other source-based distributions (Gentoo, SMGL etc.)?
there is a lot more work than just package building involved in a distro. There are all tests/verifications, stabilizations, default settings picks and maintenance. I really don’t think they have the resources needed to accomplish this.
Anyway, it is a good tool to explore the steps (what and when) you should follow to build an entire system.
I wish good luck to them (well, at least they learned a lot about dependencies).
Meta distros like Gentoo can achieve 90% of what the target audience here would like to and still have time to live a normal life. I have built semi-embedded-like distros and livecds with Gentoo – too easy. Let the distro maintainers (-many people) do the work.
If the target is to learn linux, why not use linux from scratch ?
I thought Debian could be used for such a thing?
I remember when when OS news was a cool site to discuss different OS related projects and news that were happening around the world. People would discuss them like grown ups and have good comments. Now everyone bitches about how they are unoriginal and wonders why anyone would use them instead of their “better solution”.
None of you people here that bitch have any projects. You don’t code (nor do I). You just bitch about other projects.
IF NOONE WANTED TO USE THEM THEY WOULDN’T EXIST! How hard is that for you to understand. They aren’t for everyone. They fill a requirment or a want for the developer then other people deciede they like/want to use them as well.
Its not Thom or Eugina that make this place crappy (like many would insist). Its all you people that are worthless and wake up in the morning to your OSNews and coffee and just act like cry-baby-bitches.
.adam.
Yeah, well, I don’t know about the “good old days” but being a quasi smart cynic has always been easy and popular (many seem to think: cynicism = being smart), but saying something actually constructive and useful is much more difficult…
…we can boost that 100+ distributions to 10 000+ distributions