Puppy 4.3: Why Built on 4.1?

[Pizzasgood]

Just to clear something up... In short:
4.2 was not all about bling, it also included a lot of bug fixes which were lost in 4.3, because...
4.3 WAS in fact based on 4.1.x.


In more length:

It doesn't really matter if you use 4.1.x with pwidgets or any other (useless) addition from 4.2.x or simply 4.2.x, the result is same.

No they are not. In 4.2.x, xorgwizard creates a working xorg.conf file for my machine. In 4.3, it does not.

I know this intimately because I'm the one who fixed this in 4.2.x after putting up with it for years.

4.2.x was not all about bling. That is only the most visible difference for pretty obvious reasons. There were also a lot of fixes for a lot of problems. The insert bug. Xorgwizard. We made USB installs offer the user a chance to supply boot options each boot, like the CD does. We fixed/improved a number of things in the init script. Etc.

And NO, 4.3.x is not built from 4.1 binaries

Bovine Digestive Output

It most certainly is built from the 4.1.x binaries. Yes, he upgraded a number of things. But everything that wasn't upgraded or new came from 4.1.x. Just as how everything in 4.1.x that wasn't new or upgraded came from 4.0.x. He did not recompile Puppy from scratch or replace all the core stuff with packages from another distro. Sure, there are a lot of big changes between 4.3 and 4.1. But by no means so many that it would no longer be based on 4.1.

Woof vs. Unleashed makes no difference. Woof and Unleashed are just groups of scripts that are used to take a bunch of binary packages and combine them into an operating system. To use the 4.1.x packages in Woof he probably needed to modify a few things, but again, not enough to matter. The actual binaries are still the same (where they weren't upgraded anyway).

[mulrah]

Just to clear something up... In short:
4.2 was not all about bling, it also included a lot of bug fixes which were lost in 4.3, because...
4.3 WAS in fact based on 4.1.x.

Thank you!

[Pizzasgood]

As for why he did this, I'm not sure. He did the same thing with 2.16 after we made 2.15CE. He was actually working on it in parallel with us, and some people felt pressured to release 2.15 sooner so that we wouldn't be holding him up. I don't blame him for that then. It was developed with the wrong attitude, IMHO.

4.2 on the other hand was not developed with that attitude. It was a much more serious effort. WhoDo realized that the point was to carry on in Barry's place, not to throw a party.

The end result still visually recalled the old CE. But there was a lot of work done beside the "bling".

Maybe Barry judged it superficially and decided that rather than unbling it, he'd just start over and add in the stuff he wanted.

More likely, he felt more comfortable with 4.1, because he knew 4.1. In 4.2, a bunch of people took his stuff and modified it, and he didn't have first hand memories of all the changes. In 4.1 on the other hand, he knew his way around well, since he was the one who created it in the first place.

And IIRC he started porting the 4.1.x packages to Woof and improving some scripts before 4.2 even came out, so that's another aspect. To use 4.2.x as a base he'd have had to port those packages and then go through and apply the changes he had already made. Which is a really annoying thing to do, especially with a large project like Puppy. (Spoken from experience)

So what I think is that he underestimated how much bug-fixing had been done and figured he could get away with just using 4.1.x and adding in some of the stuff from 4.2.x on top. He also probably figured that the people who implemented those fixes in 4.2.x would quickly test the 4.3 alphas and poke him to fix the regressions. I don't know about the others, but I didn't. I was too busy to keep up with 4.3, and still haven't bothered upgrading (I only realized the xorgwizard bug came back today when I booted it on my desktop for the first time to test something for somebody).

[mulrah]

As for why he did this, I'm not sure. He did the same thing with 2.16 after we made 2.15CE. He was actually working on it in parallel with us, and some people felt pressured to release 2.15 sooner so that we wouldn't be holding him up. I don't blame him for that then. It was developed with the wrong attitude, IMHO.

4.2 on the other hand was not developed with that attitude. It was a much more serious effort. WhoDo realized that the point was to carry on in Barry's place, not to throw a party.

The end result still visually recalled the old CE. But there was a lot of work done beside the "bling".

Maybe Barry judged it superficially and decided that rather than unbling it, he'd just start over and add in the stuff he wanted.

More likely, he felt more comfortable with 4.1, because he knew 4.1. In 4.2, a bunch of people took his stuff and modified it, and he didn't have first hand memories of all the changes. In 4.1 on the other hand, he knew his way around well, since he was the one who created it in the first place.

And IIRC he started porting the 4.1.x packages to Woof and improving some scripts before 4.2 even came out, so that's another aspect. To use 4.2.x as a base he'd have had to port those packages and then go through and apply the changes he had already made. Which is a really annoying thing to do, especially with a large project like Puppy. (Spoken from experience)

So what I think is that he underestimated how much bug-fixing had been done and figured he could get away with just using 4.1.x and adding in some of the stuff from 4.2.x on top. He also probably figured that the people who implemented those fixes in 4.2.x would quickly test the 4.3 alphas and poke him to fix the regressions. I don't know about the others, but I didn't. I was too busy to keep up with 4.3, and still haven't bothered upgrading (I only realized the xorgwizard bug came back today when I booted it on my desktop for the first time to test something for somebody).

Pizzasgood, thanks for this thoughtful reply. I think it's a fair and complete conjecture in response to my original post, and it makes sense to me.

Waiting to release 4.3 until the changes from 4.2 could be worked in would have eased the still incomplete transition to a truly community-driven distro. It obviously would have taken longer, but that is how everything community-driven goes.

Until we've seen a couple community-driven releases that are not undone with subsequent ones, Puppy remains a Barry Kauler distro, with community contributions in the form of puplets and Community Editions, which include 4.2, even though it was not named as such.

Thanks for all the replies. I think I got the answer I was looking for.

[vtpup]

. The version numbering makes no sense....since this bears little resemblence to 4.12 or 4.21 should it not have a different major version number like 5.x, 6.x or whatever.
Call a spade a spade....would avoid awkward questions and debates.
mike

I think this would have helped in a lot of ways. From a user perspective, the pupsave upgrade to 4.3.1 is problematic and might have seemed more understandable if the woof version had initially been called 5.0 beta. There are also enough differences, not only structurally beneath the hood, but in terms of applications that I could accept it as another full version number, even though there is a common look and feel.

It might have avoided hard feelings as well, which is getting to be pretty important around here.

Edited to remove "unable to upgrade" -- I've resolved the problems with my own installation and was able to upgrade.

[Lobster]

I think as has been pointed out there was a great deal of fixing in 4.2 and 4.2.1 but there was also (mentioned in a post elsewhere) some features that meant 4.1 was more reliable.
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy420ReleaseNotes

So as Pizzasgood pointed out Barry started with 4.1, added features that he felt improved on 4.1 and perhaps missed some.

Personally I preferred 4.2 to 4.1 and prefer 4.3.1 to both of them

[WhoDo]

4.2 on the other hand was not developed with that attitude. It was a much more serious effort. WhoDo realized that the point was to carry on in Barry's place, not to throw a party.

Yes. In fact 4.2 and 4.2.1 were designed to be Official Releases built by the community and not Community Editions as such - there was no effort to please the community in terms of content. On the contrary, the effort was to show the wider Linux community that Puppy could and would survive the retirement of its creator.

Unfortunately there were a number of "purists" who couldn't or wouldn't grasp the vision and focused instead on the so-called "bling"; despite the fact that it was literally more frugal to provide that than Barry's favourite Notecase application among other things.

My greatest regret is that good people like yourself made personal sacrifices to help meet the objective of solidifying Puppy's future, only to have that effort denigrated and disparaged on the face of a few bits of visual glamour intended to encourage disgruntled Vista users away from the dark side. That too was in keeping with Barry's philosophy - 1.x series based around Win95/98 style interface, 2.x series based around Win2K/XP style interface and 4.x looking to provide familiarity with the current M$ Vista offering.

Whatever the reason Barry chose to revert to 4.1.x binaries, the 4.2.x versions and the relevant scripts WERE most definitely available to him. It was his choice and he made it. The consequence was a number of regressions, including those mentioned in your post. That is a loss to Puppy and a wasted sacrifice to the developers IMHO. Not only the things mentioned but also the root link to the disk outside the pup_save file, HairyWill's RoxRightClicks options menu additions, ttuuxxx's mime-type fixes ... the list goes on and on.

Like the raven in King Lear, I'm left to croak "Never more ... never more". It is my fondest hope that the same fate does NOT befall Technosaurus' 4.4 project. That also has been labeled a CE version, BUT in fact it is the natural successor to 4.2.1 in many ways - an official release that just happens to have been built by the community without Barry at the helm. Support that effort as never before or Puppy will be "Never more ..." IMHO.

[aragon]

@whodo

nice to see you're around

aragon

[ttuuxxx]

Hi Whodo it is a shame that most of the work I did for 4.2 was tossed when 4.3 happened but hey I still have 2.14X and well I learned a lot with 4.2 and that knowledge went into 2.14X. Also I do consider 2.14X a community edition, because it does have a few loyal contributors that greatly helped out At this point in time if 2.14X works fine on your older pc, I would go as far as to say then you have the most advanced, user friendly, stable version of puppy ever made, for older computers.
And if I was to compare 4.3 vs 2.14X, I would pick 2.14X. The reason, Its more refined, you have right click options for burning, erasing cdrws etc, lots of extra mimes, updated icons, 24x24 jwm menu's, almost 600MB more memory running live, latest rox, gtk, FF3, Flash, takes less memory like 35MB bootup. Heck it even has BMP media player with ladspa which I think is a first for puppy
Next release which will be released maybe tonight will have a FF3 fix that allows printing, which FF3 doesn't do out of the box etc. Anyays WhoDo its nice to see you around, maybe join our little 2.14X thread that will be superseded by puppy 2.20 in the future. But first I have a couple RC releases for 2.14x, Also I'm working on the XO olpc project.
take care
ttuuxxx

[01micko]

Hello people.

mulrah, some more clarification..

BarryK had been the "Benevolent Dictator" (search for term ) since Puppy-0.0.0 until Puppy-4.1.2.

WhoDo was nominated by BarryK to be the "Benevolent Dictator" (call it "BV") of Puppy-4.2 and beyond. Due to unforseen circumstances WhoDo decided to step down from his role after he released the Puppy-4.21 bugfix of 4.2.

Barry decided to once again be "BV" of 4.3, with renewed enthusiasm due to the success of his new "woof" build system.

At the moment forum member 'technosaurus' is the current "BV".. he is in charge of development of Puppy-4.4. (as I see it anyway)

Development is underway for Puppy-5, with 'gposil' heading a 'dpup' branch, 'kirk' heading a 'tpup' branch, possibly an 'spup' branch in the mix (iguleder I believe you are involved, don't know if there is a leader or not) and BarryK interested in upup. (For definitions of the *pups, do a search )

Now I agree that 4.2, while with much community input, certainly was not a "CE" version of Puppy, and I think the same can be said for 4.4.

The "BV" has supreme control. He decides what's in and what's out. What you may not realise is that 4.3 owes a great deal to 4.2's legacy. Forum member 'trio', who started off making crappy code in 'Pwidgets' (along with myself ) put a mountain of work into 4.3 and has no less than four apps included by default. A similar story with 'tasmod', who (re)cut his teeth in the 'Pwidgets' thread. He created Psync, in 4.3 by default. Not forgetting 'zigbert ' who created Pwidgets, and Pmusic, Ptimer, Pstopwatch, Pburn... and numerous other Puppy apps, of course not all his apps are in 4.3 by default, but they live on and through constant development support 4.3 (and will support 4.4). I must mention 'ttuuxxx' too, who was tireless in 4.2 development with icewm, seamonkey, ..no I won't list them! The page is too short! BarryK takes his advice because he picks up on details many of us just plain miss. Of course there are many more, HairyWill, (I have a feeling we might see a return of roxrightclicks one day), aragon, coolpup, technosaurus, pizzasgood, and many many more, and just as many in the development of 4.3.

Really, it doesn't matter what default apps are in or out. They are all in the official repo and a bunch more on the Puppy Pet Store, puppylinux.asia and dotpups,de and many other reputable Puppy repos.

What matters is that Puppy will always remain light and easy to use..

Cheers

[ICPUG]

Thank you mulrah for raising your point and confirming how I perceived it as well.

As usual Pizzasgood comes up with most well thought out response.

Welcome to WhoDo for defending his pitch. You're missed here mate!

When I suggested what Mulrah did in Barry blog here:
http://www.puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00997
I got a curt response from Barry.

I still think that the development method (woof or previous) was not the point under discussion - it was the base. The 4.2.1 could and should have been used as the base (for the reasons Pizzasgood has made clear) and the woof development method applied to it rather than applied to 4.1. I was extremely annoyed that WhoDo's (and Ttuuxxx's) hard work was being discarded, by Barry of all people, almost immediately after he finally got it done!

People have been gradually rewriting history by saying 4.2.1 was a CE, in order to defend Barry's decision. 4.2.1 wasn't a CE. WhoDo was our leader, (and a very good one), appointed by Barry to create the next official Puppy after 4.1.2. The next leader, whoever it was, should have taken WhoDo's official puppy as the base for the next version.

I'm disappointed that Barry did not choose to call 4.3 as 5.x, which I thought was where woof development was going to be. Being a new series he could have done what he liked and 4.2.1 might have been the last of the 4 series - a fitting monument to WhoDo's work and pain.

Irrespective of the argument we are not going to change anything now. 4.3.1 exists - but there are bugs in it that are fixed by 4.2.1 and there are some features in 4.2.1 that are not in 4.3.1 and vice versa.

I just hope that 4.4 can unify the best of both. Until then I use Puppy 4.2.1, Puppy 4.2 no bling and 4.3.1, whichever is most suitable for the job and hardware.

[mulrah]

First of all, thanks to everyone for the thoughtful replies that have been added since Pizzasgood's message. This was the kind of discussion I had been looking for when I initially posted.

To clarify one of my own comments, I recognize the distinction between 4.2 and a "Community Edition;" I was just stating that 4.3 treats 4.2 like nothing more than a CE, and I agree that the argument that 4.2 was "just" a CE seems to have been used to justify the direction 4.3 has taken.

Personally, I'm just going to mentally append 4.3 with "Barry Edition" and wait to upgrade until the next "real" release.

One final note: Developers of 4.4, please please just pick one calculator--maybe two. As with anyone who wants more "bling," we can roll our eyes and point them to a web site dedicated to dozens of calculator pets.

[mulrah]

Personally, I'm just going to mentally append 4.3 with "Barry Edition" and wait to upgrade until the next "real" release.

One final note: Developers of 4.4, please please just pick one calculator--maybe two. As with anyone who wants more "bling," we can roll our eyes and point them to a web site dedicated to dozens of calculator pets.

To be clear, these kind of snarky comments are meant in no way to disparage the hard work that Barry or anyone else has done on Puppy 4.3 or any other release. I started with Puppy before 4.2 and promote it as the best lightweight distro out there, bar none. As with a small business or a start-up non-profit, none of this would have been possible without Barry's vision and dedication.

[technosaurus]

It is a very difficult task to track the changes made in the community editions vice just opening your /mnt/sdaX/sources folder and refreshing your memory. Sources/patches aren't uploaded to a central spot and many changes aren't documented anywhere but a stray forum thread.

Since starting 4.4 CE I have had to make a concious effort to track all of this down, which meant downloading 100s of pet packages converting them to tarballs and extracting the "puppy extras" to an add on folder/pet so that they can be more easily tracked from version to version. I have started Pcompile (Gedrean has helped immensely to it lately) to build the packages in a default way so that all you have to do after the build is add the "puppy extras" (as long as upstream doesn't drastically change the format or something)

It works the other way as well. Barry patched Homebank to use png vs. svg. I figured it out and sent it upstream so that hopefully we don't have to keep patching it. (Actually I just used sed to replace .svg with .png in all of the .c and .h files and used Barry's icons)

On the plus side I will be uploading all of my "puppy extras" folders and build scripts as well as Notes, patches and "source code" for any Puppy programs to the SVN on our google code page so that this work does not need to be duplicated.

[Lobster]

Yes. In fact 4.2 and 4.2.1 were designed to be Official Releases built by the community and not Community Editions as such - there was no effort to please the community in terms of content. On the contrary, the effort was to show the wider Linux community that Puppy could and would survive the retirement of its creator.

Thanks for stepping in Warren
You are quite right 4.2 was very much turned into a CE effort after the event.

All those involved with 4.2 'Deep Thought' deserve to be proud.
Warren and Ttuuxxx in particular.
4.3.1 is very much the result (even if coding has been left)
of what happened in 4.2.1
What a developer does
is dependent on their inclinations
and judgement at the time.

We are organic. Things change very fast.
We have come a long way from 'Meaty'
http://pupweb.org/wikka/Puppy2xxCE
http://tmxxine.com/buddha/ce.html - never used in Meaty

I hope Warren (WhoDo) will be around more.
His contributions make Puppy a better place to be and grow.

Technosaurus is now providing the impetus for 4.4CE
Something we can all look forward to

[brymway]

I rarely question Barrys decision of what he puts in an official distro. In my eyes he has the right to go back to dotmatrix style if he wants. This is his bag, and if it wasn't for his choices we would all be using something else. (oh the horror!)

In my opinion as far as feel goes 4.12, 4.2 and 4.3 are all different. I've used them all and 4.12 works and feels the best on my rig. When I used 4.2 I changed the things I didn't like to make it operate the way I like. But inside hardware issues prefered 4.12 so I've gone back to that.

I've always wondered about the multiple calculators. In my personal distro I did away with them and stuck in galculator like the rest. To date I've never heard Barry respond to why he puts so many of the same things in his distro. I like to think its his Alfred Hitchcock cameo thing. For all I know, after he releases the distro to the public and goes to bed, it gives him something to snicker about. It might be a sense of humor. Everytime I get a new release that's one of the first things I check and it's a source of humor to me.

Throughout the 4.xx series with both leaders in charge, I always have fun looking thru the new distro. Every one is fantastic.

Nice to see you again WhoDo.

[mulrah]

I rarely question Barrys decision of what he puts in an official distro. In my eyes he has the right to go back to dotmatrix style if he wants. This is his bag, and if it wasn't for his choices we would all be using something else. (oh the horror!)

I suppose this is exactly my point. I thought he'd retired and that Puppy was now purely a community-driven distro, even with Barry coming out of retirement to lead 4.3. Handing a project over to new leadership is always tricky, especially when you started it.

Having read the replies to this thread, Barry's blog, and other threads, it is now clear to me that Puppy really remains Barry's distro and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Knowing this, I'll probably end up switching to 4.3, because 5 will probably be more like it than like 4.2, as will 5.1 and so on. 4.2 works for me now, but, if I want to gain the benefits of future releases, I might as well get used to the Five Calculators and other quirks all over again.

[Gedrean]

Now, now, let's not fuss. See, when I get to be prolific enough with Puppy Development (and masochistic enough), I'll take over as "BV" for 6.7 or whatever version, and you'll have 50 CALCULATORS! HAHAHAHA! You thought 5 was extravagant?!?! This thing'll need a Blu-Ray disc for all the damn calculators I put in!!! AND FOUR SPREADSHEETS! Think two or three simple text editors is enough? No! Let's have FOURTEEN! Exactly fourteen, no more, no less.

[mulrah]

Now, now, let's not fuss. See, when I get to be prolific enough with Puppy Development (and masochistic enough), I'll take over as "BV" for 6.7 or whatever version, and you'll have 50 CALCULATORS! HAHAHAHA! You thought 5 was extravagant?!?! This thing'll need a Blu-Ray disc for all the damn calculators I put in!!!

Why wait? Somebody should do a PuppyCalc puplet.

[MinHundHettePerro]

...
Why wait? Somebody should do a PuppyCalc puplet.

It is hilarious (in a way).

Sad/true side of the story is that none of the offered calculatotors has ever been good enough, in some sense .

fwiw/
MHHP