The need for a standardised software stack

[andrewebling]

I really like what you guys are doing with Raspberry Pi. At the moment it seems you are focussed on the hardware (which is understandable), but surely the complete package involves a standardised software stack too?

Without a standardised software stack, it will be difficult for users/developers to share their work and the hardware you've worked so hard to produce will just become another way to run the existing plethora of Linux distributions, complete with their complexity and fragmented nature.

I'm sure someone at some point will probably create a stripped-down dedicated Linux distro for Raspberry PI, in fact there will probably be dozens of them. But I think it's really important that there is an "official" distro which is owned and directed by the Raspberry PI foundation.  This will probably involve doing something bold (and potentially unpopular) like picking a single programming language, standard library, GUI library, desktop environment and running with it.

To put it a different way, I think you guys have a unique opportunity to own and do something different - a bit like what Apple have done with the Mac and OS X; a complete environment where the hardware and software are designed to work together, with maximum integration. Only based on Linux and open of course.

If the Raspberry PI has an official software distribution, it will also help to focus and direct a unified effort, rather than spawning a dozen half-baked efforts, all pulling in different directions and aiming to do different things.

So to summarise, I think a standard software stack designed just for Raspberry PI will help it to gain adoption, momentum and eventually a place in education and IT history.

best regards,

Andrew

[jamesh]

This has been discussed a lot on the forum.

I believe the intention is that there will be one official distribution tailored for the Raspi, I cannot say who's. You are correct in that it will make the whole effort much easier to handle.

Whether there is a standard language, I am not so sure. Its easy to just recomend one language, but its also very easy to install others. I feel sure that the  basic distro will come with the standards - C/C++, Python and Perl (and Arm asm for the brave ones) , although I think that maybe educationally Python is the best for teaching.  We do intend to provide teaching materials based on the software provided. These are being worked on.

That said, I am also sure there will be many other distros produced by third parties, and we really welcome that sort of effort.

[cnxsoft]

That was the thread - http://www.raspberrypi.org/for.....-standards

I hope this one won't be as long and contentious...

[jwatte]

Some basic requirements:

1) Do not write in /, /bin, /etc, /usr, ... for installing non-system software!

2) Make /home be FAT32 for easy PC sharing

3) Make /var be writable, and symlink /usr/local to /var/usr/local

Some additional requirements that would be nice:

- installing software without root

- some way of auto-discovering what's been installed and whether it's CLI or GUI (for launchers/shells)

- dependency management

All of those can probably be done with a suitable set of rules on top of dpkg or rpm or whatever. But they need to be anchored in the community, and this means there needs to be a distribution specific to rpi!

The habit of merging every kind of software into the same overlay (/bin and /usr/bin) the way it's done on Linux is quite annoying to people trying to make systems that are manageable and robust for end users.