Familiar's relationship to Debian

Jim pitched in with the following update on what he has been doing
with Intimate:

James Conner writes:
> Hi,
>
> Yes... The intimate project is running debian unstable running practically
> unchanged on the iPAQ now...I use an extra apt-source to provide iPAQ
> customised .debs in addition to the debian unstable packages... I haven't
> pulled in that much stuff from familiar yet, I'm still working on that...
> Some of the packages in my repositary are pretty much identical to the .ipks
> that were source, but generally, I've taken the equivalent package direct
> from debian, replaced the binaries, named the package slightly differently,
> and added Provides and Conflicts for the original package. By doing this, I
> get the benefit of the debian menu system within my window manager(s), and
> have packages generating their own menu entries. I also get matching
> dependencies for everything too.
>
> It is my hope that these modified packages will make it upstream to debian
> (once they become of a suitable quality/stability.. most of them have sprung
> into creation within the last 21 days). The intimate project is ideally a
> self terminating project.. It will end when debian has all the packages, or
> is compatible enough with iPAQ/Psion to make intimate un-necessary..
> There'll be no point in intimate then, as intimate is just a path to debian
> anyhow.
>
> However, I too would love to see greater granularity in .debs as, for
> example xfonts-100dpi is not entirely suitable for the iPAQ (megabytes of
> fonts that are too big for the screen), although many parts of the package
> are. If you like, the intimate project is tackling the same packaging issue
> as familiar project, just from the opposite direction. Currenlty a useable
> intimate setup runs to about 100MB.. I expect that at least 50% could be
> shaved off this without loosing functionality by making -tiny packages for
> the iPAQ.
>
> Jim

Jim, I would definitely be interested in synching things up between
Familiar and Intimate. I imagine that you are going to want some
packages from Familiar eventually. As you grab them and find
naming/dependency incompatibilities with Debian, let us know and we can
probably take care of these easily.

Thanks,

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth@east.isi.edu
4350 N. Fairfax Dr. #770, Arlington VA 22203	          703-812-3725