vanilladpup-x86_64-9.2.22 devx

[OscarTalks]

I was trying to upgrade my frugal from 9.2.0-11 to 9.2.22 but I don't see any devx in the "Assets" list.
The extra.tar has kernel_sources, docx and nlsx but no devx. Is it now stored or included elsewhere?

[dimkr]

The idea of a "devx" is incompatible with apt: if a package is present but only in devx, should apt install it if you're trying to install an application that depends on it? And what if you don't have devx loaded?

The 9.2.x releases omit devx intentionally, because it can only lead to (severe) issues. You should apt install gcc, etc' instead.

[OscarTalks]

Thanks for the reply. I do vaguely recall you mentioning this along the way but I test several Pups over time and sometimes I forget all the various changes and things. When you say "apt install gcc etc", does that mean that I might need to "apt install" lots of other stuff that was previously in devx too? What about autotools, cmake, git, svn, DEV packages of all the libraries, other packages that sometimes crop up as build-time dependencies? These days it is becoming more necessary to have meson and ninja as well. I suspect there might be a lot of odds and sods that you would have to figure out that you need, then install each of them individually before a user can even begin to think about compiling anything from source.

To be honest, if apt is not compatible with devx, then it would be nice to have the option to work without apt (is it not in the optional bdrv anyway?). There has been some criticism of PPM and it is above my pay-grade to some extent, but I am a bit disappointed to see vanilladpup (or should that be Woof-CE) drifting away from some of the things which have defined the uniqueness of Puppy. There has even been talk of moving away from ROX which would be a real shame.

While I am sort of on the subject, would it be possible in vanilladpup to include the option to switch off pulse audio and just run alsa? There are some things with pulse that I just can't get to work (or find configuration options for). There is no option (that works) to disable auto-mute when headphones are plugged in and I like to route my VoIP telephony (linphone) audio through a USB soundcard which I can get fully working in alsa but not in pulse.

[dimkr]

It is possible to build dpup with devx, without apt, without PulseAudio and so on, and that's the best solution I can offer, if you prefer not to install the specific packages that you really need that are normally included devx. Nothing has changed in woof-CE: it supports X.Org, ALSA without PulseAudio, ROX-Filer and all the legacy GTK+ 2 stuff, etc'. I even set up continuous builds of bionic64, to ensure that woof-CE is always backward compatible with Puppy tradition as it gains new features and gets more and more decoupled from old and deprecated things.

But you'll have to do this on your own, because I don't have the time (and willingness) to support more than one Vanilla Dpup "product". IMO some "unique" features of Puppy (like PPM, ALSA without PulseAudio/PipeWire, ancient GTK+ 2 applications and the use of aufs) make it very incompatible with other distros, and need to go away to build a distro that works for most users most of the time, has a future and can be maintained easily with little human resources.

[OscarTalks]

Good to know that the options still exist within Woof-CE to accept or decline some of these "modernisations". I am not saying I want things to stagnate. I am perfectly happy to have software updates and new solutions to tasks, so long as they improve things or at least don't make them any worse. I never really took to pulse, but from my testing it is not about personal taste, it is that it won't do some of the things I want it to. I believe Phil B. was saying that in his next release he would have pulse included, but possible to disable it and fall back to alsa. That seems like the best idea if it is not too difficult to do. I regarded your experiments with Xwayland in vanilladpup to be interesting and promising and I said so some while back.

In the case of adding apt to vanilladpup, as someone who likes compiling from source and who sees the benefit of doing so in a cut-down distro like Puppy, for me it is an easy assesment of cost versus benefit if the price of adding apt is that you have to totally sacrifice the availability and convenience of a loadable devx. If one or the other has to go, then I would remove apt without hesitation. If people want to run a distro with apt they can install DebianDog or lubuntu or countless other options can they not? Personally I have never had problems with PPM but I guess you have studied the inner workings of it more closely. Some people are saying good things about this "pkg" package manager as an alternative. I am just not all that enthusiastic about allowing the distinctive characteristics of Puppy to dwindle away. I suppose a Slackware Pup would not have apt anyway, so maybe an S15 Pup as a new Distrowatch candidate will be something more along the lines of what I would use regularly. Anyway, just offering some feedback and ideas to ponder. Might try to produce a dpup variant of my own if other things on offer are not to my liking, but so far I think there are some good options available off the shelf.