Puppy 4.3: Why Built on 4.1?

[mulrah]

I rather like Puppy 4.2, but, upon booting into 4.3, I find the look and feel to have taken a step backward, and, in fact, it turns out that 4.3 was built from 4.1.

Why is this? I realize I could tweak 4.3 to be more like 4.2, but that's just extra work on top of starting from a new pupsave file (since conversion is ugly), reinstalling pets, etc. For now, I'm sticking with 4.2.

If there's a thread or reference page on this already, I'm happy just to be pointed in the right direction. I'm not trying to start a debate and am open to the likely idea that I'm just missing something sensible.

[mulrah]

I probably put this in the wrong place on the forums. Moderators, please feel free to move. Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Iguleder]

Puppy 4.1.x and 4.3.x were developed by Barry in different standards than the community-built 4.2.x series. The 4.2.x series had all the bling and (useless) eye candy that makes Puppy trash the old-hardware-compatibility agenda.

Besides, many users didn't like 4.2.1's extras, including me. 4.3 feels more professional than 4.2.1.

EDIT: btw, it's not built from or on top of 4.1, it's built using Woof (while 4.1 is built with Unleashed) with pretty much the same applications.

[Lobster]

I find the look and feel to have taken a step backward

Barry incorporated and updated many features and updates in 4.2.1 into 4.3.1
However Barry is a minimalist and left out the bling

Bling is still available
http://puppy-look.tk/

[mulrah]

Puppy 4.1.x and 4.3.x were developed by Barry in different standards than the community-built 4.2.x series.

I get that. I'm asking why. Is there a reason for moving away from a community-built effort?

The 4.2.x series had all the bling and (useless) eye candy that makes Puppy trash the old-hardware-compatibility agenda.

Besides, many users didn't like 4.2.1's extras, including me. 4.3 feels more professional than 4.2.1.

Like I said, I'm not trying to start a debate. If there are any clearly outlined reasons that Barry or others close to the development have articulated, I'd love to know about them.

EDIT: btw, it's not built from or on top of 4.1, it's built using Woof (while 4.1 is built with Unleashed) with pretty much the same applications.

My understanding is that it used Woof to build 4.3 "from" 4.1's binaries. Sorry that was not clear in my original post or if this is actually incorrect.

[mulrah]

Barry incorporated and updated many features and updates in 4.2.1 into 4.3.1

What are the features carried over from 4.2 to 4.3 that are not just extensions or updates to what was already in 4.1? It seems to me more like the most recent version of everything in 4.1 made it into 4.3 with little reference to 4.2 at all.

However Barry is a minimalist and left out the bling

Is aesthetic (non-"bling") minimalism really the goal here? Let's not kid ourselves: twenty-two desktop icons and five calculators hardly seem to work toward this. I appreciated that 4.2 removed some redundancies and less useful apps, but now they are back in 4.3.

Again, I'm just wondering why. Thanks for any background or history you can give me on these decisions.

[mikeb]

Let's not kid ourselves: twenty-two desktop icons and five calculators hardly seem to work toward this.

Thanks for making me smile this morning .

Well people like to impress....some want to make a distro that...whoa...looks kool, others work on the basis of...whoa...how did you fit all that in?

Interestingly microsoft made its fortune using the former approach......plus the big must be good phsycology (worked for CB radios )

So ugly and functional or pretty and iffy........pretty AND functional would be nice.
I took some of the pretty of 4.20 and added it to 4.12 and fixed a few things...is quite a pleasent result....moral...don't accept pupppy as it comes.

mike

[Lobster]

Thanks for any background or history you can give me on these decisions.

The community editions may be very different
for example 1.09CE used Firefox and Geany

2.13CE incorporated OpenOffice (in fact it was an English version of Hacao)

2.15CE
was a bling effort that
directly resulted in a far prettier Puppy (in the long term)

4.2CE
was another blinger

Ttuuxxx is working on a 2 series that may have an official release
- it will have very individual characteristics

What about the puplets?
Something for everyone

The 5 series using Woof
is likely to have different feature emphasis
some more bling - some less

[Iguleder]

Again, I'm just wondering why. Thanks for any background or history you can give me on these decisions.

4.1.x is developed by Barry, 4.2.x by the community.

Barry wants Puppy fast and suitable for older hardware, and some people in the community just want their bling.

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.

And NO, 4.3.x is not built from 4.1 binaries, it includes the same applications in most cases, but updated. Also, 4.3 is not supposed to continue 4.2.x directly.

[mulrah]

And NO, 4.3.x is not built from 4.1 binaries, it includes the same applications in most cases, but updated. Also, 4.3 is not supposed to continue 4.2.x directly.

Someone else on the bug fix forum described 4.3 as "recompiled" from 4.1. Regardless of how you want to qualify it technically, I think we all agree that 4.3 descends from 4.1, generally ignoring the design decisions in 4.2. Thanks for your input, lguleder.

[mulrah]

The community editions may be very different

However, 4.2 was not a community edition, even though it was developed by folks other than Barry. Let's move away from the "bling" vs "no bling" distinction. As I stated, that was not the intent of my original post, even though the way I wrote it implied as much.

Perhaps rephrasing my question would help: why for God's sake have the five calculators returned to Puppy in the 4.3 release? Talk about non-minimalism and aesthetic bloat! I would much rather have to add the hiawatha pet separately than have to remove each of these calculators one by one from the Puppy menu.

Of course, my question is about more than the calculators, but maybe narrowing it down to this one topic will help avoid the "bling" debate.

[mulrah]

pretty AND functional would be nice.

Agreed, and in my opinion the best way to achieve both at the same time is to remove clutter, as it is neither pretty nor functional.

I get the interest in providing choice, and I like having a couple ways of doing things available to me without an additional download. I strongly prefer the jwm tray to the cluttered desktop on 4.2. I feel like htop is far more functional than pprocess, but it's dropped in 4.3.

I guess I don't get why some choices are dropped, especially when they were part of a community-built and official release, while others (5 calculators) are added back in.

To go in the opposite direction of my last post, I question whether Puppy will ever become a community-driven distro. The previous model, in which it was basically Barry's distro, quirks and all, with various unofficial puplets from the community springing from it made a lot of sense. If I don't like the Five Calculators, fine; I just hide them everytime I upgrade.

If Puppy is going to evolve into anything other than Barry's distro, then the trust in a community-built release has to be there. What if 4.2 had actually been version 7.1, and then we get a version 8 that has all the same apps, albeit updated, from version 4.1?

Eventually, and I'm not saying it has to happen now, there has to be a shift such that the community-built editions have primacy over any one developer's vision. Maybe a "7.1 Barry Edition" would work in my previous example. It would certainly be immensely popular, but it would not make the community-built version seem like it was an aberrant offshoot of the "real" Puppy, the way 4.2 now seems to have been.

[Sit Heel Speak]

Perhaps rephrasing my question would help: why for God's sake have the five calculators returned to Puppy in the 4.3 release?

Barry has written, again and again, that 4.3 is all about perfecting the Woof buildsystem, not about perfecting the mix of applications. It is reasonable to assume that his pre-built .iso is a "Out house sink" version, intended just to show doubters and fearful first-time do-it-yourself Woof-builders that all these apps really can indeed be built this way, and will indeed work. If you don't want five calculators, you can edit the Woof scripts to build Puppy yourself with just the ones you want.

[mikeb]

Barry has written, again and again, that 4.3 is all about perfecting the Woof buildsystem,

which explains the original confusion. 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.

All the puppy 2.xx versions were progressions on the same structure...1.xx was too. But refering to puppy 4.xx as far as I can tell there are at least 4 different core structures going on under that version.
Call a spade a spade....would avoid awkward questions and debates.

mike

[mulrah]

Barry has written, again and again, that 4.3 is all about perfecting the Woof buildsystem, not about perfecting the mix of applications.

Fair enough, but if it was to be so application-neutral, why not base it on 4.2? Going back to 4.1 makes a pretty strong statement that 4.2 and its associated apps are outliers from the general progression of Puppy.

[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.