Re: [LAU] what about a meta distribution system?

On Fri, 7 Dec 2012 15:32:24 +0100
renato <rennabh@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> Hi, I just had a [very fuzzy] idea that might be worth,
> or it might be not... I thought I'd just put it out here in the wild,
> maybe someone finds it insightful and makes something out of it.
> You're warned, it's quite a rambling... here it goes:
>
> what about creating some sort of self-contained linux-audio package
> manager, which is distro agnostic? I'm thinking of python (even perl
> if I'm right has a similar tool), where you have tools like pip to
> search, install and uninstall modules and you can easily create local
> installations on your system (virtualenvs) where you can tinker all
> you want without compromising system wide settings.
>
> Ideally with this system for audio you would have access to
> latest binaries of all audio apps and preconfigured environments...
> You could download the exact binary versions and configurations the
> professional and semi-professional on this list use and install them
> in a local directory, ready to use and make music, without spending
> time on configuration.
>
> Of course there are things that would not be easy (or possible at all)
> to fit in this scheme, like jackd, rt-kernel and audio card
> configuration... But on the other hand I'd love it if when I wanted to
> try out the latest apps I could just download a known working
> configuration and start making music right away, instead of spending
> days debugging compiling issues due to slightly mismatching library
> versions or whatever...
>
> The reason all this stems from is that I am only a computer-music
> hobbyist and dedicate a little portion of my time to it. It often
> happens I found out about a cool new app (din,giada,
> non-software, muse2...) and when I find some free time to try and make
> sounds with it, I never find binaries for it and I frequently can't
> compile it the first time, so I have to start the usual cycle: report
> bug to dev, wait for reply, supply more info, download patch,
> recompile and so on.
>
> I don't know if such a thing is technically possible... But don't the
> latest video games from the Humble Indie bundles use something
> similar? I.e. they usually supply a distro-agnostic installer which
> puts all the binary it needs in a self-contained directory, and then
> it runs more or less without interacting with the rest of the
> system... Ok I'm not sure it's exactly like this, but I think at
> least the critical libs which the game depends on are provided, to
> ensure compatibility throughout many different systems.
>
> Wouldn't such a thing, together with the possibility I was mentioning
> before of sharing such micro-distributions (maybe using something
> like PGP-signing to be sure you're downloading binaries only from
> trusted sources), be a great boon for linux audio users?
>

Forgot to add, a typical use case I had in mind would be to have a
session manager in these micro-distributions with one or more
sessions... That way one could easily achieve all in one audio
environments (like reason, rezound, lmms) using properly configured
single purpose software (yoshimi - hydrogen - qtractor for example)

So I would here a tune someone posted on the LAU list, and I
could download a single .zip archive he posted, extract it in a folder,
launch a single script and have the exact same software alrready
configured and connected the way he used to make the tune

don't know maybe it's day dreaming but I thought it was worth a shot...
it seems to me we're not so far away from that with non-session-manager
and all...

cheers,
renato

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