Rich Edelman wrote:
If you were to start a new linux distribution, what would you use for package management? rpm? dpkg? none (tar.bz2s)? portage? roll your own?
Well as a Kubuntu Developer I'm partial to apt / dpkg but one small thing about that is it dosent support biarch ( x86 / x86_64 or ppc32 / ppc64 ) that i would really like to see but afaik thats being worked on / patched in.
What about managing dependencies and fetching packages from remote repositories? yast? apt? smart? yum? urpmi? portage?
Smart is looking really good , infact at the (K)Ubuntu Developers Summit in Paris this past week it was one of the topics for edgy ( the october release of *ubuntu ) but over all it is still very young and has some issues of its own , I would probbly try to get dpkg and smart to co-exist for the time being
What architectures / hardware would you support? ppc? alpha? x86 / x86_64?
x86 and x86_64 ( with legacy ppc support ) if i was targeting just desktops , with the addition of server targets I would imagine UltraSparc T1 Niagra ( the GPL Sun Chips ) support would be a good target also
On multilib capable arches (such as x86_64), would you support both 32 and 64 bit, or go 64 bit only?
We'll in _MY_ senerio it would be hard without the patches to dpkg or use a a 32bit chroot ( cleaner IMHO anyhow ) but incremental upgrades even with a chroot are alot better than total 64bit untill more and more software is ported.
Would you go the way of Ubuntu, and work around Gnome mainly? Or the way SuSE traditionally was, and be mostly KDE oriented?
KDE to the end BABY !! ;) ( but again i'm a tad bias being a Kubuntu Developer )