I don't think I quite follow what you are trying to say.

I really have no idea what prompted this. I think I came up with a nice out-of-the-box solution to a problem I found, but beyond that I don't really think anyone working on the project is necessarily "better" than anyone else. To be frank, you're all strangers I don't know well enough to compare myself too.

This much I think I follow.

In no way do I intend to force this on anyone. Personally I felt it was a relatively niche project. I expected quite a few people to find it interesting, but that's really it - I didn't expect anywhere near the number of people offering to try it out that have. Would you mind elaborating on what gave you that idea? I'd really like to see if I can change whatever I did to cause this to avoid having other people draw similar conclusions.

That's what I used to do, but it was far, far to much work. No where near everything I wanted was available in backports, and to be frank I don't want to compile quite that much. Gentoo was interesting but not my cup of tea. This system provides me a way of grabbing arbitrary packages from arbitrary Linux distributions with relative ease, and meets my needs perfectly. I can certainly understand this not being for everyone - if you're happy with Debian and backports+compiling, you're more than welcome to stick with it. However it is not a sufficient solution for what I want, and based on the feedback I've been getting, I'm not the only one.

Stable has two definitions in this context that I can think of: (1) reliability and (2) lack of changes. I want something which stays the same. I do not necessarily want to keep myself up to date on the changes going on if I don't have time for it. I want something that stays the same for extended periods of time. However, I don't always want that - occasionally I do have the free time to play with something cutting edge, and so I do.

I used to do that, but I got tired of it. Bedrock's system is significantly less work to achieve the same goal with the number of things from other distros I want.

I disagree. I want it all to feel like one, cohesive system. I don't want to think about what chroot something is in when I run a random command, I just want to run it and have it launch like it was a traditional Linux distribution.

If you restrict it to need, then yes, that's probably true. However, I want quite a bit more than that, and this give it to me quite nicely.

To be clear, I don't think this is for everyone. If you're happy with what you've got, please do continue to use it. For me, absolutely no distro I could find provided all of the features I wanted, but I found if I could just pick pieces from a variety of them I would get want I want. So I did it, and figured it would be worth sharing in case other people feel similarly.

That's mostly a personal quirk I cannot find the words to fully justify. If you really want a good answer ask in #suckless on irc.oftc.net - there are others there who feel similarly about dbus but are much more apt at explaining why.

I know the ins and outs of creating a distro more than I understand people - I could be underestimating the demand for this. I'd sure love to see a large community grow around Bedrock Linux - I hope you're correct.

While I would absolutely love for that to be true, I'm doubtful it's feasible to get this to be sufficiently simple and user friendly. While I could do things to make it much easier to install, there are fundamental aspects which I don't quite have sufficient imagination to foresee as ever being simplified sufficiently. I'd love to be wrong, though.

That's definitely a goal I'm working towards.

Should the opportunity for that arise, I don't see myself turning it down. This is all F/OSS - worst case scenario I quit and fork the corporate version.

Thanks! If you ever get over your noobiness and fears, I'm certainly open to further help.

Most daemons from, say, sysv, aren't really dependent on the init system. They're just programs that init happens to run when it feels like it. You can run them manually whenever. For example, if you want to run Debian Squeeze's cups, you can run "/etc/init.d/cups restart" absolutely irrelevant of what the init is.

The daemons Ubuntu uses talk to init for some reason. If init doesn't talk back, they refuse to run. See here for my specifics on it, which links to a bug report on the matter that I'm doubtful will be resolved within the foreseeable future.

I really did not intend to be misleading in quite that way; if you truly feel that way, I apologize. I created something I feel is really neat and would like to share, and felt slashdot would be a great place to share it. You can check my UID - I'm not exactly new around these parts. I'm also not making any money on this - I'm not sure an advertisement is the best description of what this is.

Sounds like a good enough reason to me. Happy to see I'm not the only fan of the show who frequents slashdot :D

That's a really neat idea - I'll look into it. It should be in the TODO before I go to bed tonight. Thanks!

Well, the issue then is that testing and unstable aren't quite stable enough for me. I want something which I can learn and set up, then leave running for years. Debian stable could do that, but neither testing nor unstable could.

However, at times I also want to play with the newest goodie from Debian Sid. I don't want to reboot, I don't want to use a VM, I just want to run a program from Sid. With Bedrock Linux, I can do that: I can have a system which is almost entirely Debian Stable, except for the packages I want from Sid when I want them. Any library compatibility issues one would normally have trying to get a .deb from Sid into Stable are non-issues with Bedrock Linux.

Add on to that that I can use Gentoo's portage to relatively easily keep a specific package customized to my specific tastes. Say I don't like dbus, but I want firefox - Debian's iceweasel is dependent on dbus. I could just get it from Gentoo with the flag set to exclude dbus. Yet everything else would be Debian.

At the same time, I am 100% library-compatible with Ubuntu, so for projects like sage mathematics, which I know provides packages for Ubuntu, I can use those with absolutely no worry that they won't work. Debian Testing cannot do that.

I really, really like Debian. If Debian could do what Bedrock Linux can, I would have never tried to make Bedrock Linux. The issue is, however, that you can't install an arbitrary program from testing/unstable into stable.. Many of those packages are dependent on specific libraries which aren't available in stable. With Bedrock Linux, you can install and use packages from both, at the same time. I can run Squeeze's newsbeuter in Sid's X11 and have it open a window in Wheezy's iceweasel. It's all transparent and feels like one cohesive OS.

You're not the first one on slashdot to make that connection, but I would like to point out that it is in fact a strength of Bedrock Linux and not a weakness.

If you truly feel that way, then I have failed to explain what it does properly.

The beauty of this is you can have the majority of the system be Gentoo if you want, except if you are in a rush and can't wait for something to compile, you can just grab it from the repository of another Linux distribution. Or the opposite - you can have the majority of the system be, say, Debian, except those two or three packages that you really don't like the Debian developer's compilation choices and just get them from Gentoo's portage.

I'm glad you feel that way. I'll do my best to get it there!

Sadly, it really can't be considered user friendly at the moment. I don't expect to take any market share away from, say, Linux Mint. In fact, I should probably actively discourage it, at least for this release. However, this fit my use case, and I figure at least a few others had similar interests but were disappointed no one distro provided all of them at the same time.

I do have a hard time not feeding the trolls. I keep trying to rationalize something which isn't necessarily acting rationally.

And thanks :D