Decoupling Moode from the OS

[TheOldPresbyope]

But one thing that would be  a massive improvement is if moode could become a proper linux distro.  That way apt-get update would not trash the system but just update it!   I can't imagine this is impossible.  I presume the reason that it has not been done is because there would be some issues integrating the moode self-update method.

I don't mean to be flip---well maybe a little---but the mantra in FOSS projects is "just fork and do it."

More seriously, running apt updates and upgrades may or may not "trash the system." In many cases, it's innocuous but there's ample examples of times when the Debian and RaspiOS developers introduced incompatible changes which caught us out. Were the essential bits of moOde to be made into a .deb package we'd have to spend considerable time tracking the evolution of all the other packages we depend on. By nailing each release of moOde to a specific major/minor release of RaspbiOS we can contain the madness.

I wanted to install an editor (emacs).  I tried to do that and it was clear it required an update of the underlying debian.  This led to disaster.  It's not that serious since I can rebuild from scratch fairly easily but ... still no emacs.

Emacs, huh. Don't know why you want to run Emacs on a headless music appliance. OTOH, I don't know why you had a disaster installing Emacs. Here's what I got just now on my moOde 7.4.1 player.

Code:

pi@rpi4b2:~ $ sudo apt-get install emacs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
 emacs-bin-common emacs-common emacs-el emacs-gtk emacsen-common exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light fonts-droid-fallback fonts-noto-mono ghostscript
 gsfonts guile-2.2-libs imagemagick-6-common libcupsfilters1 libcupsimage2 libde265-0 libgc1c2 libgif7 libgs9 libgs9-common libgsasl7 libheif1 libijs-0.35
 libjbig2dec0 libkyotocabinet16v5 liblqr-1-0 libm17n-0 libmagickcore-6.q16-6 libmagickwand-6.q16-6 libmailutils5 libmariadb3 libntlm0 libotf0 libpaper-utils
 libpaper1 m17n-db mailutils mailutils-common mariadb-common mysql-common poppler-data
Suggested packages:
 emacs-common-non-dfsg exim4-doc-html | exim4-doc-info eximon4 spf-tools-perl swaks fonts-noto ghostscript-x m17n-docs libmagickcore-6.q16-6-extra gawk
 mailutils-mh mailutils-doc poppler-utils fonts-japanese-mincho | fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-japanese-gothic | fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-arphic-ukai
 fonts-arphic-uming fonts-nanum
The following NEW packages will be installed:
 emacs emacs-bin-common emacs-common emacs-el emacs-gtk emacsen-common exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light fonts-droid-fallback fonts-noto-mono
 ghostscript gsfonts guile-2.2-libs imagemagick-6-common libcupsfilters1 libcupsimage2 libde265-0 libgc1c2 libgif7 libgs9 libgs9-common libgsasl7 libheif1
 libijs-0.35 libjbig2dec0 libkyotocabinet16v5 liblqr-1-0 libm17n-0 libmagickcore-6.q16-6 libmagickwand-6.q16-6 libmailutils5 libmariadb3 libntlm0 libotf0
 libpaper-utils libpaper1 m17n-db mailutils mailutils-common mariadb-common mysql-common poppler-data
0 upgraded, 43 newly installed, 0 to remove and 215 not upgraded.
Need to get 60.5 MB of archives.
After this operation, 226 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
...and the install proceeded without issue...

Now that it is installed I suppose I should embed moOde in it as a replacement for Bongo. (In my past lives at various research labs I never met an Emacs user who didn't want to control the world from within it.)

It would also be fantastic to see moode branch out to include an x86 version. I have several mac-minis that are looking for new lives and volumio (which offers an x86 variant) is just not as good an experience as moode on the pi.  But I do appreciate this is probably a bigger task than turing moode into a distribution.

Mac-minis would make excellent Emacs platforms.

Anyone who branches out to include an x86 version has to stick around to support all the folks who try making it work and to keep up with new releases of moOde. That alone is enough to dissuade me. It's hard enough to keep up with the RPi userbase.

Regards,
Kent

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