the ideal linux distribution

It is still in an early stage of development (0.2) so I believe that, if Lakerdonalds decides to implement any good ideas posted it can still be done.

This does seem alot like the latest Jedi release, minimalist, if that is what you mean. It contains only the most basic set of software (about 140 MB) to be able to download and install more from the net using it's package manager force-get. Oh, and I agree with that people shouldn't be forced to the command line.. :-)

I must say I'm not too familiar with how bittorrent actually works as I'm on dial up and haven't used it at all yet as I'm not sure if it makes any sense for use via dial up. This, of course poses a question of wether such a distro would be friendly to the remaining dial up users if it used bit torrent technology for publishing/downloading packages..

That reminds me of ebuilds for gentoo, PKGBUILD's from Arch ABS system and even force-get files for Jedi (which has, afaik, been inspired by gentoo).

I do believe it is a good idea. It works well.

Agreed.

I have used rox-filer and rox-desktop on slackware and it is really great. However I haven't tried it as a standalone desktop environment/window manager. I used it ontop of xfce4 which would be another good candidate for a default DE for a new distro, although not with the AppDir advantage anyhow. (Admittely I'm not too acquainted with the whole AppDir thing, I'll have to look it up..)

Anyway, there are two ways I would go about answering the question of an ideal distro. One is to describe what would be the ideal distro for me and the other would be the answer to the question what kind of distro would I make if I was to start my own distro project.

For the answer to the first question I'd say something like Arch GNU/Linux is pretty close. I consider myself, more or less, an "advanced" GNU/Linux user (not afraid of command line and manually editing configuration files) so something like Arch GNU/Linux fills my needs pretty well. This basically means that I like stable, simple (in a "KISS" style) and fast GNU/Linux distro which puts me in control. It should also have a package management solution which does all dependancy checking and retrieving of binary packages automatically, but provides a good option of organized compiling of my own packages if i want to (i.e. Arch ABS) (kind of a cross between gentoo and slackware). What I would wish from Arch is just a bit better stability and maybe some default settings... but that's gonna improve (it's still in 0.7).

Now, If I am to make a new distro (which is likely I wont, but than I transfer my ideas to existing new projects such as Jedi here) then I would strive to make it a newbie friendly distribution with all the power which advanced-users friendly distros have. To save you too much of the rant I currently imagine it as Arch GNU/Linux with a friendly GUI installation, GUI interface to pacman (arch package manager) and the most important configuration scripts. Jedi seems pretty similar in a way to Arch so i'd say it would also be an excellent base to such a "easy to use" distro.

These ideas may not be too original or differentiating, but then, Arch isn't really in any of the two major groups (debian and RedHat based) which could, somewhat, make it a unique base.

If I'll have any specific ideas I'll post.

Thanks
Daniel

These are some nice ideas, and I'll go through each one like libervisco did.

It's not too late as Jedi is still in active development. I love new ideas!

That's what I've been trying to do with Jedi (at least 0.2 and later, as 0.1 was based off of Gentoo) Since I compiled it myself, I was able to take care with which packages I installed, and I was constantly asking myself: "Is this package NEEDED?" and if it wasn't, then it was scrapped from the base installation. I also declined to install X with the base system, simply because it takes up so much space. As a function of this, there is no default UI.

While this sounds good in theory, I don't plan on adopting this any time soon. Here's why:
1. I'm fine with people rolling their own packages, but my understanding of a torrent, tracker/trackerless, I'd end up with a bunch of half-repositories, and people would run into the problem that they had with yum or apt4rpm:
Not every package is available on every mirror.
2. It would also compromise the trust that every package is tested and I've made sure that it works. I really don't want the userbase flooded with unreliable packages, as it reflects poorly on myself.
3. I really like the .fs format employed by force-get too much to change it to a torrent-based application at this point!

Other than the GPG/checksum aspect, that is exactly what the .fs file format is.
It goes:

#url_/packages/src/foo/foo.tgz
#url_/packages/src/foo/foo-gcc3.4.patch
#url_/packages/src/foo/foo-bugfix2.patch
#dep_dependency1 dependency2 etc.
#package_foo
#version_1.2.3
tar xvfz foo.tgz
patch -i foo-gcc3.4.patch -u
patch -i ../../foo-bugfix2.patch -c -d foo/lib
cd foo
./configure --opt1 --opt2
make
make install

So the package sources and the buildscript is kept seperate.

Which documentation do you mean?

As described before, there is no default anything really, especially when it comes to X.

But there aren't any mirrors, just people providing their homemade packages in an easy way. In no way those are considered part of the distro, except for the fact they can be easily installed on it.

Not part of the base distro, not part of the base distro responsibility.

It doesn't look like it would have to be changed much. Add the name of the packager to the name of the binary package, and GPG signatures to the .fs, and you're done. As I understand it Jedi binary packages don't contain dependency information and such, right?

All! Man pages, info pages, anything.

Oh, and here's another nice idea:
put configuration files in a local revision control system (darcs seems good for this)

Well I'm not focusing on binary packages at the moment. Most of my time has been spent on getting source working. I'm almost done fully implementing the source-aspect of force-get, but you seem very into binary. If you'd like, I would really love to have somebody else aboard on the development of force-get.
As to sharing .fs files via bittorrent, you could do that.