The Goals

At this point, we tried to find a way out of what had now become distribution hell by establishing clearly what our requirements were:

1. Be able to add support for a new distribution simply and without changing any of the released packages,
2. only have to run QA on the new distribution and not have to perform regression on any others, and the Marketing one:
3. be able to release on a designated distribution within 60 days of being told to.
4. minimise the costs associated with deploying and maintaining our product on the different distributions.

These goals are deceptive, since the requirement to be able to release, item 3, morphed into be able to release without requiring customers to do any upgrades to their systems, but be tolerant if they had. Now we have to be able to upgrade some distributions to the minimum working versions of software (and kernel) as part of our installation.

Figure 1: Distribution Enabling Package Scheme