Whats up in Puppy World

[jamesbond]

the key is to remove the components from woof-ce

Woof-CE has four components, roughly.

1. The Puppy initrd.
2. The Puppy common scripts and app-lets (gtkdialog scripts etc).
3. The PET builder: a custom package builder that builds binaries from source.
4. The build system proper.

In my opinion, what makes Puppy a Puppy is (1) and (2) (but feel free to disagree with me).
(3) was once a separate script distinct from Woof-CE, but it was merged together to make sure Woof-CE didn't carry obsolete binaries.
(4) is the one that everyone complains about being complex. It's necessarily complex because it was designed to support multiple different upstreams and architecture (it can build from Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, Void ... and for 32-bit Intel, 64-bit Intel, 32-bit ARM, etc).

If all you want is to build is 64-bit Intel Debian-based Puppy, the build system can be simplified tremendously.

and i am working on that now

Good luck.

Remember, though, the entire point of the exercise is to have a final system that will attract other developers to use it. Otherwise, it will be just "yet another build system".

[wanderer]

as concerns woof-ce

i see people saying

people should learn to use it
people should push their improvements back into it
more developers should get involved
a lot of it is out of date and needs to be fixed
etc

on the other hand i see people saying

i cant use it
i dont want to use it

etc

the woof-ce people are using it
and producing fantastic work
so im sure they will continue to use it

we can go along this way forever
and that will be fine

the only problem is that this leaves most of the community out

i think i will try to look into an alternative to woof-ce
but just for fun
this is a hobby after all

could someone tell me what method is used to compress/uncompress the puppy initrd

wanderer

[wanderer]

hi jamesbond

im not ambitious
i have to keep things simple

debian 64 bit intel would be fine for me

wanderer

[wiak]

...
the woof-ce people are using it
and producing fantastic work
so im sure they will continue to use it

we can go along this way forever
and that will be fine

the only problem is that this leaves most of the community out

+1

Nothing needs done or argued about these points at all though. Time has a way of showing what is actually current 'truth'. If woof-CE attracts new team of developers all will surely be fine. If it doesn't, then it becomes archaic unmaintained software. C'est la vie either way.

[wiak]

But I believe (right/wrong?) that this particular thread was not started with the intention to be about Puppy Linux distro only or even necessary 'much' (or its build system woof-CE). Am I wrong in thinking the "Puppy World" referred to the overall "Kennels" and all projects within it? There are plenty of other threads about Puppy Linux itself in terms of its future, so was a bit refreshing (I thought) that this thread was about whole forum contributions.

Of course, Puppy users can talk about Puppy (again) if they so choose, but if just interested in Puppy Future I do wonder why not use that thread to avoid too much regurgitation? If genuinely posting about collaborative approaches in builds here (KL, Puppy, DD, and so on), then this thread is great for that compared to most others. I do hope no one asks me to look up old links again though - just look them up yourself if that old stuff still interests you.

hi all

this is a thread to discuss the technical innovations that are occurring in Puppy World

that is all of the projects on the forum

i am hoping that this will bring all the projects together to exchange ideas
and to have a place where forum members can go to see what is happening

wanderer

[wanderer]

hi wiak

i intend this thread to be about anything related to puppy world

that is anything on the forum

so firstrib debiandog fatdog puppy whatever

that way people dont have to worry about what they want to talk about
more relaxing that way

wanderer

[jamesbond]

i see people saying

people should learn to use it
people should push their improvements back into it

I already said the reason for it.

more developers should get involved

The whole idea is to pool resources to build something grand together, rather than split the sources and everyone re-inventhing the wheel (the same bugs being fixed multiple times by multiple people working on different puplets).

a lot of it is out of date

Because not enough people work on it

on the other hand i see people saying

i cant use it
i dont want to use it
etc

Which is fine. Nobody has to use Woof-CE if they don't want to.

the only problem is that this leaves most of the community out

Everybody can operate an oven.
Not everyone can operate an industrial bread-making machine.

Everybody can learn to drive a car.
Not everyone has the aptitude to become a mechanic.

Puppy is for everyone.
Building Puppy is not for everyone.
This is true no matter what build system or tools you use.

That's all I can say.

could someone tell me what method is used to compress/uncompress the puppy initrd

Code: Select all

mkdir -p /tmp/initrd
cd /tmp/initrd
gunzip -c /puppy/initrd.gz | cpio -i

[wanderer]

hi jamesbond

you are correct

however since this is a hobby for me
i have nothing to lose
by playing around

and thank you very much for the info on the initrd
and the info on the components of woof-ce

wanderer

[jamesbond]

however since this is a hobby for me
i have nothing to lose
by playing around

Definitely.
You have to remember one thing.
There were no "exclusive" Puppy developers (except Barry himself).
All people in this forum that you call as developers (Puppy or otherwise), were once upon a time users, and only users.
Like you, they got curious, and experimented - as a hobby.
And before they knew it they started making puppies that could be shared and enjoyed by many others.

So good luck with your exploration.
May you be safe and be fruitful in the end.

and thank you very much for the info on the initrd
and the info on the components of woof-ce

You're much welcome.

[jamesbond]

As for this one:

Also, it was jamesbond who insisted on what are now very old references.

I did not ask for old references. I was asking for evidence. It was your own choice to post those old references.

Apparently it was not my choice; it was your request:

... some have tended to gang together ...

Who are these "some" people? Can you name them?
...
I saw this in the old murga-forum. I never saw anything like this in the new forum since it started in 2020. Can you provide a reference, a link to a post, maybe, that this still happens here? Even better if you can point out the member propagandising this idea.
...
I don't think anyone ever says that they are riding on Puppy Linux's popularity either. Can you provide the reference?

As you can read from my post that you quoted, I asked for:
a) names
b) a reference, a link to a post, that this still happens here ("present tense").
I did not ask you to dig up old references - that you did on yourself. Perhaps because apparently it is indeed an OLD issue that is no longer relevant today, but for some reason you still like to bring it up from time to time as if it is still current and problematic today?

And looks like you did indeed accuse me of "making accusation" and it was you who requested the reference links bringing up "old grievances", not me... So maybe check what you say in future, eh???!:

I don't think it is anything but unhelpful to use that word "accuse" about what I say. Why such aggression?

Please do not put words into my mouth. I never accused you of anything.
...
If you did not want anything changed, then why did you keep bring up old grievances which has already been addressed?

All you need to do is ask @rockedge to re-structure the forum. He has been very attentive and very accommodating with changes. So instead of making accusation that Puppy Linux is unfairly exposed, just raise a request to him to make the change, I'm sure he doesn't mind.

Ahem...

LOL. I know you're going to quote this.
See, I did not accuse you of anything. I said that you were the one making accusations.
If you cannot understand the difference, then it's on you and not me.

[wiak]

LOL. I know you're going to quote this.
See, I did not accuse you of anything. I said that you were the one making accusations.
If you cannot understand the difference, then it's on you and not me.

LOL. So you were accusing me of making accusations... And???!

As you can read from my post that you quoted, I asked for:
a) names
b) a reference, a link to a post, that this still happens here ("present tense").
I did not ask you to dig up old references - that you did on yourself.

James... a "reference" is old by definition. You were saying you had seen such things on old murga forum and not on this forum. You said nothing about present/current/right-now in your (unwanted by me) request... Old murga forum is long time ago now. If you meant current by in the last month or two or whatever, you should have said so; in the circumstances of your comment re old murga forum but not new forum I was faced with ignoring you or giving you an example from new forum. You did not say present/current; present has already passed by the way - each day is a new future. Old murga forum is years ago now I think. Move on. Try and get real.

[rockedge]

@rockedge answered my question, and as far as I remember, he was the one who coined the term.

That's just because I'm handsome, have blue eyes and a calm demeanor. Decent with the press and know when not to say something.
Just the face of the operation.........spoke's person........press secretary....a working class stiff as the lightning rod.

[wiak]

As an end result to be used, there really isn't a lot of difference at all between using DebianDog, or any Kennel Linux distro, or Puppy Linux, or Slax, or blahblahblah

I have to disagree with this one. Very few distros have something similar to PUPMODE 13

But some distros do. With KL_full2frugal most all mainstream distros like Linux Mint or Zorin also can (via FirstRib initrd). Just as one example for those who believe Puppy is "unique" with its Pupmode 13, here is extract of Porteus Linux docs:

The 'EXIT:' extension tells the 'changes=' cheatcode to keep all
of the files that have been added/deleted/modified during the
live session stored in memory until you reboot/shutdown. Your
RAM works as a buffor which gets dumped on the drive only once,
when the session is finished.
...
While you are running a session with changes=EXIT, you can use the
'dump-session' command (run as root from the command line) to move all
of your changes from RAM to your storage media. This will reduce the
risk of data loss and free up your RAM.

It's just a kernel level provided technique (nowadays primarily via kernel-provided-to-anyone overlayfs or aufs code), with user scripts with the likes of rsync to save back as efficiently as possible (Puppy didn't produce rsync command either) - but similar system code has been available for decades. Nothing that could nowadays honestly be called a 'unique' feature. Someone probably received a PhD for the ideas way back in the 1970s or 80s. History anyway. Personally I find it disingenuous (dictionary: slightly dishonest and insincere) the way some people claim such old techniques as Puppy-only-unique; either that or they simply haven't done their research and know the history. Lot of rubbish that claim is what I say and stand by. No distro here needs to make such nonsense claims in order to have value; they are valuable distros on their own actual merit.

Actually, in terms of 'merit/future-thinking', rockedge is IMO correct in his assertion that Sofiya's build efforts with Hyperland are ahead of the pack here. It is certainly difficult to 'keep up' with that speed of advance and I hope that fact doesn't frustrate some here Of course, the way FirstRib main build system is used allows it to lever dev work of upstream and hence makes small distro development rapid - who said the result was 'unique', but not re-inventing the wheel is sometimes advantageous and the result is not an upstream big distro (unless we want it to be...), but it has all typical frugal install save on demand features and advantages either way.

[wiak]

@rockedge answered my question, and as far as I remember, he was the one who coined the term.

That's just because I'm handsome, have blue eyes and a calm demeanor. Decent with the press and know when not to say something.
Just the face of the operation.........spoke's person........press secretary....a working class stiff as the lightning rod.

I think I'm more handsome, but that's just cos I'm looking in the mirror and possess imagination. I'm as calm as thunder whenever I want to be

[jamesbond]

LOL. I know you're going to quote this.
See, I did not accuse you of anything. I said that you were the one making accusations.
If you cannot understand the difference, then it's on you and not me.

LOL. So you were accusing me of making accusations... And???!

So "saying" is now "accusing"?
Who is accusing who, now?

James... a "reference" is old by definition. You were saying you had seen such things on old murga forum and not on this forum. You said nothing about present/current/right-now in your (unwanted by me) request... Old murga forum is long time ago now. If you meant current by in the last month or two or whatever, you should have said so; in the circumstances of your comment re old murga forum but not new forum I was faced with ignoring you or giving you an example from new forum. You did not say present/current; present has already passed by the way - each day is a new future. Old murga forum is years ago now I think. Move on. Try and get real.

Obviously we have a different understanding of the word "recently". This was your original statement:

Unfortunately, for a very... long time, some have tended to gang together in insisting on focussing on their favourite Puppy Linux and until relatively recently made it obvious they considered the other 'distros' featured in the forum as having some kind of invasion characteristic onto Puppy Linux turf and made a big endless deal about proclaiming what is "official" Puppy Linux, which as a concept almost seems to suggest that the likes of DebianDog and Kennel Linux were free-loading on top of Puppy Linux as some kind of counterfeit(!)

You said, "until relatively recently". In my world, posts from 2022 is not considered as "relatively recently".

That being said, I did say that I did not see any posts on this forum that disliked the non-Puppy distro's presence here:

I saw this in the old murga-forum. I never saw anything like this in the new forum since it started in 2020. Can you provide a reference, a link to a post, maybe, that this still happens here? Even better if you can point out the member propagandising this idea.

On this aspect, you managed to prove that there was at least one person who said so, back in Sep 2022 (I would not count @dimkr response which you also quoted, as in my opinion he said that in the heat of the argument and the quoted post left lots of context to make the intended meaning ambiguous).

But it's not "recently", and as I said earlier, this is an outlier. It's far from the evidence of "ganging-up" or "propagandising". It's just an opinion just like everyone else.

Hence, it does not back up your statement that "people have been ganging up" or "propagandising" against non-Puppy distros here; which again I say: I see nothing like that here, so why do you keep bringing it up?

Instead, focus on the positive, and move on. Focus on how to make the distros here in the forum flourish. I reckon that's what @wanderer had in mind when he started this post. It's not to bicker and complain of imaginary unfair treatment and non-existent attacks from the propagandist gang or keep arguing about "official is baaaad". But instead, focus on what we already have, and how to make it better. Puppy, KL, DD, and everything else here.

[wiak]

Instead, focus on the positive, and move on. Focus on how to make the distros here in the forum flourish. I reckon that's what @wanderer had in mind when he started this post. It's not to bicker and complain of imaginary unfair treatment and non-existent attacks from the propagandist gang or keep arguing about "official is baaaad". But instead, focus on what we already have, and how to make it better. Puppy, KL, DD, and everything else here.

Yes, do try and do that jamesbond. That would be refreshing.

[rockedge]

So "saying" is now "accusing"?
Who is accusing who, now?

Every representative of every government on this planet.

To get off topic a bit...I always liked this tune since 1980

best guitar solo I know....

[wiak]

Well, nothing to panic about; that's the positive since, as dimkr famously stated almost exactly one year ago (slight exaggeration for simplicity, sorry - was a bit less than 11 months ago for the relatively fussy in watching universe expand over time):

People find Puppy somehow, and the non-Puppy distros get a "free ride" thanks to the "brand" and this forum.

[dimkr]

dimkr famously stated almost exactly one year ago

And I'm still surprised to you're saying that Puppy should remain alive, but at the same time, also suggest Puppy/woof-CE are inferior to KL/FR or whatever, and also claim that nothing developed here is of value because it's all 'rubbish'.

[jamesbond]

Instead, focus on the positive, and move on. Focus on how to make the distros here in the forum flourish. I reckon that's what @wanderer had in mind when he started this post. It's not to bicker and complain of imaginary unfair treatment and non-existent attacks from the propagandist gang or keep arguing about "official is baaaad". But instead, focus on what we already have, and how to make it better. Puppy, KL, DD, and everything else here.

Yes, do try and do that jamesbond. That would be refreshing.

I have said all that I wanted to say.
I'll leave it to the readers to make their own conclusion.
Thank you for your willingness to spar with me in the last 3 pages of this thread.
It has been very invigorating.

[jamesbond]

dimkr famously stated almost exactly one year ago

And I'm still surprised to you're saying that Puppy should remain alive, but at the same time, also suggest Puppy/woof-CE are inferior to KL/FR or whatever, and also claim that nothing developed here is of value because it's all 'rubbish'.

But @dimkr, my rubbish is way better than your rubbish!

[wiak]

I have said all that I wanted to say.

Oh good.

[dimkr]

But @dimkr, my rubbish is way better than your rubbish!

Your rubbish is great and you're very consistent at improving this rubbish for years. I also like how you resist the temptation to promote your rubbish over other rubbish.

EDIT: 'Rubbish Discussion Forum' is not a bad name if that's the only thing we can agree on

[wiak]

I'm still using my own Music Studio Puppy (ArtStudio64) which was created from the
Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 packages. I used MakePup to create this one and added all my developments.

@wanderer
@rockedge
It's log ago when I used MakePup to build my Puppy.
I modified it a little before starting the work.

I recall a post or topic long ago wherein the original creator of MakePup mentioned that it is not continued and also not updated for the use of the updated WoofCE to build Puppies beyond Bionic Puppy.

Ah... yes... that would be a long time ago. I was that original 'creator' of MakePup in 2017: https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... 41#p965541

Alas I forget all about it, but truly surprised that it continued to function later when modified a little. Great to hear, however, that it still proved useful.

A year and a half after my initial MakePup release I began FirstRib and basically had to move on to concentrate on that per my last MakePup post in Mar 2019.

[fredx181]

@wanderer You like or not the direction that your thread went recently ?

[dimkr]

If all you want is to build is 64-bit Intel Debian-based Puppy, the build system can be simplified tremendously.

As @jamesbond says - woof-CE is currently big but most of it is unused. If you take out the 'rubbish' it becomes really small and easy to work with.

If you want a build system like that, maybe you'll like my woof-CE fork as-is, or find it easier to develop a build system based on it rather than starting from scratch. It's open for contributions but I won't accept anything (I want nothing to do with X.Org, PulseAudio and GTK+ 2).

Again, I don't think that lack of build systems is holding Puppy back, I think it's the lack of willing and able contributors that want to fix big problems like unreliable boot, or deal with years of workarounds and rotten code that make Puppy slow and messy. Code rots if it's not maintained well, and every line you write can become tomorrow's technical debt.

[wanderer]

hi fredx181

actually i do like the way the thread is going

i think real progress is being made

i also am interested in whose rubbish is better and who is more handsome

wanderer

[wiak]

i also am interested in ... who is more handsome

At last I'm worried

[fredx181]

hi fredx181

actually i do like the way the thread is going

i think real progress is being made

And... what that is in your opinion ?

[wanderer]

hi fredx181

i think the biggest benefit that has come out of all of this
is that the community is beginning to understand
that puppy linux is a concept rather than a piece of code

this understanding opens the door to major technical advances
because other systems can now be considered on an equal footing
and their technical advantages can be adopted as part of the overall system

before that anything except the "official" puppy system
was considered irrelevant or even threatening
and so the community became locked into doing things in only one way

your debiandog is a perfect example

it makes a very puppy-like distro
so in my mind is interchangeable with woof-ce
both for the user and the developer

woof-ce makes a puppy-like distro
debiandog makes a puppy-like distro

so for me personally
if i want to make a puppy-like distro
i can use debiandog instead of woof-ce
and still feel i am advancing puppy as a whole

perhaps someday some of the advantages of debiandog
will even be incorporated into the future beyond-woof-ce puppy system

wanderer