the carrot and the stick

[Bob Hunter]

the list of live cds could be improved with more detailed info. For example, gentoo ppc does not include cifs support, which makes it unsuitable as a "rescue/admin" live cd. I then propose to add grades, based on the number of key features; for example, if the number of features sum up to 63, the grade 30/63 is the indication that that live cd offers only 30 features in the white list. The aim is to identify this core list, and encourage the various distributions to cover the list via the above carrot-stick approach.

Bob

[nick]

This is a good idea, but it appears to involve an extraordinary amount of work in keeping track of, say, 63 features of 200 LiveCDs, just for the rescue aspect. Also there would be trouble in defining what rescue/admin tools would be required, and which would be left out. I'm sure hundreds of tools exist, but what would differentiate between the CIFS, mount -t smb, Nautilus, and Konquer methods of mounting smb drives?

Perhaps one distro could be used as a standard, such as Knoppix, and included tools could be compared against that. It would still be difficult to apply to every LiveCD in the list, as many mainters do not show this information on their websites, and the only way to find it would be to download the ISO and dissect it.

More info for the list is something I have slowly been adding and is making it's way onto the web feature by feature. The last thing to be added was the popularity column.