Woof-CE Next Generation

Woof-CE is the Community Edition (CE) of Woof build system. Woof build system (currently at version 2, so often called as Woof2) is the meta-distribution of Puppy Linux. It enables one to build a fully customised Puppy Linux distribution from many parent distros.

I have been working on the next generation of Woof build system. It initially started as a tool running on top of Woof2 infrastructure (original blog post here and here; the original branch holding the code is called "deb-build" on my github Woof-CE fork) - and now I have modified them to *replace* the Woof2 infrastructure and completely run on its own.

Front-ends have been added, so deb-build is now only one of many (future) builders to build Puppy Linux from different parent distros (deb-build builds from Debian-like distros, like Debian, Ubuntu, and possibly even Mint - I haven't tried that, though).

The main premise of the new build system is that puppy adapts to the parent distro, rather than the other way around. Doing this means the original parent distro is kept as close to its original design (including the use of its original package management system) and thus making more of the parent distro packages usable in Puppy derived from it - because as far as I can see, that is the reason for having Puppy as a derivative anyway (if you're not interested in using parent distro packages, then may as well build Puppy from scratch where you control everything and can optimise everything).

The links section of this blog points you to the most recent and experimental version of this build system ("woof-next-james" branch on my github fork of Woof-CE - this branch supersedes the original "deb-build" branch posted in my earlier blog posts). As they mature they will be posted to the official Woof-CE repository under the same name; and finally the most stable code would be merged to "woof-next" branch of Woof-CE (note that "woof-next" is an integration branch and contains changes and contributions from others too)

"woof-next" currently builds an ISO capable of booting to Xorg. There are some little modifications I have not yet ported from deb-build, but they will be soon.

In the experimental branch, you will find builder for building Slackware-based puppy too. The builder works but the resulting ISO will not boot because of it is missing puppy-specific packages that are not available from standard Slackware repository (e.g. busybox, mingetty, etc).

Note that this woof-next is still in its early phase. It lacks both the diversity (not many distros supported as parents yet) and versatility (it will only build x86 puppies, x86_64 being experimental and arm is completely unsupported yet) compared to the Woof2 build system. In time, I hope to address all of these.


Posted on 15 Jun 2014, 18:25 - Categories: PuppyLinux Linux
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Comments:

Posted on 27 Nov 2014, 0:28 by User69
"Offline buils"
Hi

what about using Woof-CE or Woof-Next offline ?
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Posted on 17 Dec 2014, 4:24 by jamesbond
"RE: Offline builds"
Both Woof-CE and Woof-Next are meant for off-line use. Get the tarball from github, expand it on your local disk. Then run the scripts, they will fetch and download the required packages (Ubuntu/Debian/Slackware), but this is done only once. Once downloaded, the build process is offline and can be re-run many times without further downloading.
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