Foresight Linux Announces The End Of Development

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Foresight Linux Announces The End Of Development

Foresight Linux was a great distribution back in the day for showcasing the latest GNOME components, but after a decade of work, the project is shutting down...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Foresight-Linux-The-End

[DarkCloud]

And with that in mind anyone heard what's going on at Corel, I haven't gotten an update in what seems like a decade

[madjr]

meh.

back then this distro supposedly always showcased the latest gnome (even claimed at some point to be the official gnome distro?), then they stopped doing that and didnt want to move to the new gnome 3 and now they are dead...

Half these distros are just redundant and not even updated so they need to go the way of the dodo already...

[tmpdir]

Although I partly agree with Madjr about the redundant distro's, its always sad to see a project die where abiously has been put in significants amounts of time.
I hope the teammembers have found an interesting project to continue using their skills on, most linux distro most definitly could use "some" improvement.

[mark45]

What a sad day, now the Linux distro count is down to just 10 083 823, of course someone will soon create a new distro so hopefully we'll soon be back to 10 083 824.

[Michael_S]

The thing that made Foresight interesting was the 'conary' package management system. It had a few innovations over the Debian-created .deb with dkpg and apt-get and also over the Red Hat -created .rpm with rpm and yum. I can't remember all of them, but for example:
1. It builds each package in its own chroot using the listed dependencies to be sure a required dependency is never missed.
2. If a transaction fails, it automatically reverts the system to before it started.
3. You have a historical list of all transactions in order and can move backwards. (I think yum has this, but not apt-get.)
4. You can set up multiple software package repositories and it tracks which repository was the source of each package, and you can configure it to update that package only from that source.

On the downside, as of the last time I used conary in 2009 or so it was slow when you had large software updates. The project is still active, hopefully it's better now.

I haven't had any problems with apt-get or yum in years, but I'm always curious to see if any of the 'upstart' packaging systems will gain any traction. I've followed conary and more recently Pacman, Nix, and XBPS.

[Sonadow]

The thing that made Foresight interesting was the 'conary' package management system. It had a few innovations over the Debian-created .deb with dkpg and apt-get and also over the Red Hat -created .rpm with rpm and yum. I can't remember all of them, but for example:
1. It builds each package in its own chroot using the listed dependencies to be sure a required dependency is never missed.
2. If a transaction fails, it automatically reverts the system to before it started.
3. You have a historical list of all transactions in order and can move backwards. (I think yum has this, but not apt-get.)
4. You can set up multiple software package repositories and it tracks which repository was the source of each package, and you can configure it to update that package only from that source.

On the downside, as of the last time I used conary in 2009 or so it was slow when you had large software updates. The project is still active, hopefully it's better now.

I haven't had any problems with apt-get or yum in years, but I'm always curious to see if any of the 'upstart' packaging systems will gain any traction. I've followed conary and more recently Pacman, Nix, and XBPS.

Are you serious? Conary was nothing but pain and tears for me. Foresight doesn't even has its own package repository; it leached from rPath, and the transfer rate for always painfully slow (around the single to 1x/2x kbps range). You can literally watch paint dry while waiting for Conary to finish retrieving a package.

To top it off, Conary's dependency resolution was utterly broken. Just about every large application (e.g.: VLC, OpenOffice, Firefox) that required a large number of dependencies always failed to install with that dumb 'unable to find package' error when I am staring at the exact package in rPath's repositories. Now imagine downloading + installing >30 packages via the web browser by hand just to get VLC working, because Conary is too dumb to parse and crawl through its own repository.

And to think it actually once stood the highest chance of getting desktop Linux out to the mainstream: Shuttle preloaded it on their computers at one point of time.