For the Debian fan...

Another suggestion for anyone interested in getting involved with Woof:

Woof should be able to build from the Debian repos. This is particularly interesting considering that a new release of Debian is not far away.

It would involve examining the table in DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu and changing the package names in field-3 to suit Debian. Create a copy with the changes as 'DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-debian' -- my '2createpackages' and '3builddistro' scripts are supposed to recognise these files with different last name '-ubuntu' and '-debian' and offer a choice which one to use -- but the scripts would need to be checked as I haven't actually done it.

In most cases the Debian part-names are the same, for example, 'abiword_' but in some cases Ubuntu may have some version information like for example 'abiword0-1_' which may need to be changed.

You would need to obtain the package lists from the Debian repo. I downloaded the 'Packages' files from the Intrepid 'main' and 'universe' directories and renamed them as 'Packages-ubuntu-main-intrepid' and 'Packages-ubuntu-universe-intrepid'. You would have to do the same thing for Debian and name them as 'Packages-debian-main-<releasename>' and 'Packages-debian-universe-<releasename>'.

The '1download' script can be generalised to recognise these files, for Ubuntu and Debian.

Oh yeah, the way I have set it up, file DISTRO_SPECS has this in it:

DISTRO_VERSION="002"
DISTRO_NAME="Woof pup"
#prefix for puppy files... exs: woofr555.sfs, woofsave.2fs, woofz555.sfs
DISTRO_FILE_PREFIX="woof"
DISTRO_BINARY_COMPAT="ubuntu"

That last one determines what distro Woof builds from. So, the scripts will look at DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-${DISTRO_BINARY_COMPAT}

So, we can write '1download' to also look at 'Packages-${DISTRO_BINARY_COMPAT}-main-${DISTRO_COMPAT_VERSION}

Tags: woof