Summary of the workshop on CDDs held in Valencia
Hi all,
this a first report of what happened in that amazing city named
Valencia during the workshop on Custom and Derivative Debian
Distributions. It is just a summary of what happened and I'd suggest
to discuss specific issues by spawning dedicated threads.
First of all let me thank Sergio Talens-Oliag and Jordi Mallach for
having made this event possible and for the warm hospitality they
showed us.
What follow is a summary of what emerged not only during the actual
workshop, which was held in the Museo de las Artes y las Ciencias, but
also in the many conversations we had in the breaks and in the
evening.
If you notice that any information is missing, wrong or not precise,
please feel free to reply correcting it.
Last but not least, a preliminary collection of pictures of the event
can be viewed here:
http://alvin.homelinux.net/bins2004/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++ General information ++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The meeting on Custom and Derivatives Debian Distributions was part of
the I Congreso Software Libre organised by the Comunidad Valenciana
[0], which main goal has been to be a forum for discussing the
prospectives and the experiences of the use of the Free Software in
the educational system.
Most noticeably during the congress the LliureX project [1] has been
officially announced.
Furthermore the presence of Richard Stallman from the Free Software
Foundation and Jon Hall from Linux International contributed to the
visibility of the event.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++ Who attended the workshop ++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here follows an alphabetically ordered list of the Custom Debian
Distributions who were present in Valencia, along with some very brief
information about them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Debian-Med
URL: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/
Attendants: Andreas Tille
Committee: Voluntary project
Target users: Professional and researchers working in the medical
field.
Debian-Med is and official CDD, fully integrated inside Debian.
However Andreas explained that in many cases the free software medical
applications currently available are not yet ready for real life work,
probably due to the lack of the right users/developers critical mass.
The current strategy of Debian-Med is to gather all the interested
parties and grow little by little until it's possible to provide a
proof-of-concept product, which may worth the interest of some
institution or company.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: AGNULA/DeMuDi
URL: http://www.agnula.org
Attendants: Free Ekanayaka
Committee: Formerly funded by the European Commission, now
voluntary project economically supported by Firenze
Tecnologia [3]
Target users: Musicians, researchers, audio professionals
Currently a semi-official CDD, in the sense that part of the packages
are already in Debian and a Debian Multimedia mailing list
exists. Free Ekanayaka is in the process to become a Debian Developer
and once he gets in he'll upload to Debian the rest of his packages.
Moreover he is closely following the debian-custom mailing list, and
working to improve the cdd-dev package and make the A/DeMuDi meta
packages compliant with the emerging CDD guidelines.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Guadalinex
URL: http://www.guadalinex.org/
Attendants: Javier Vinuales, Teofilo Ruiz Suarez
Committee: Junta de Andalucia
Target users: All the citizens of the Andalucia district (Spain)
The distribution was born after that the Andalucia local government
established a legal background to regulate the adoption of Free
Software by the public administration system. Guadalinex is already at
its 1.0 release and enjoys the support of the local government, who is
pushing to spread it on the whole area.
The focus is on the political and social aspects of the process, more
than on the distribution itself, and a considerable amount of the
effort concerns reaching a consensus among the local realities.
It's not and official CDD and its contributions are not fully
integrated in Debian. However Javier and Teo are both Debian
Developers and are aware of the importance of establishing common
methods and technologies to create Debian derivatives.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: LinEx
URL: http://www.linex.org/
Attendants: Nobody from the LinEx project was actually present, but
Alvaro del Castillo from Lambdaux [2], who is very close
to them, was able to attend the 2nd day of the workshop.
Committee: Extremadura Regional Government
Target users: Students and teachers of all the schools of the
Estremadura district (Spain)
The distribution is currently widely adopted in the educational system
of Estremadura.
The two main developers are not affiliated with Debian, and since now
had few contacts with it. However Alvaro reported that they are
interested in establishing a tighter relationship with Debian in the
future, and the debian-custom mailing list as been addressed as a
possible bridge between them and Debian.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: LlureX
URL: http://www.lliurex.net/
Attendants: Sergio Talens-Oliag, Jordi Mallach
Committee: Conselleria de Cultura, Educaci=F3n y Deporte de la
Generalitat Valenciana
Target users: Students and teachers of all the schools of the
Valencia district (Spain)
The project is just started and, after a study and experimentation
period with possible demo releases, will provide a first stable
release by September 2005.
Sergio and Jordi are both Debian Developers, with the intention is
ideally to build a fully Debian compliant official CDD. However due
their time constraints and to the not mature state of the CDDs
framework, they may possibly need to divert from Debian in special
cases.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++ Talks ++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here follows a summary of the talks given by the attendants from the
various CDD.
All the speakers have tried to be as concise as possible in presenting
the peculiarities of the respective distributions, while rather
concentrating to those issues they faced which might be common to all
CDDs.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker: Andreas Tille
When: May 6th, afternoon
Slides: http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/200405_valencia/i=
ndex.html
This first talk was an introduction survey on the CDDs, which
basically summarise a more extensive work on the subject [4].
As it was targeted to a general audience this session was attended not
only by the people invited to the workshop, but also by persons new to
the CDD concept.
Andreas introduced the concept of CDD as the effort of to not make a
separate distribution but rather make Debian fit for special
purpose. Then he outlined the status of the official CDDs and finally
exposed the techniques currently available to develop a CDD.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker: Free Ekanayaka
When: May 7th, morning
Slides: http://www.miu-ft.org/~free/200405-valencia/AGNULA-DeMuDi_presenta=
tion.pdf
The second day of the workshop was explicitly devoted to in depth
analysis and discussion of technical issues.
Free's talk started with a presentation of AGNULA/DeMuDi, along with
brief comments on some issues possibly relevant to the other CDDs, in
particular the need to rebuild packages, partially forking from
Debian.
Then he proposed an operative definition for the concept CDD and
finally he described the debconf pre-feeding approach for customising
Debian packages, providing some real life examples.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker: Javier Vinuales
When: May 7th, morning
Slides: http://www.miu-ft.org/~free/200405-valencia/adaptando_debian_a_sab=
ores_locales.pdf
After a brief presentation of the Guadalinex project, Javier
introduced the issue of the Debian release system, which currently
makes difficult for a CDD to base its releases on Debian stable.
Then he described some possible modifications to the Debian archive
and release system, which are partly mentioned in Andreas' document
on the CDDs [5].
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker: Sergio Talens-Oliag
When: May 7th, afternoon
Slides: Speech only
Sergio described the goals of the LlureX project and the interaction
that the developers will have with some teachers of various subjects
which are part of the LlureX team as well.
Andreas asked him about the relationship with the
Skolelinux/Debian-Edu project, and he explained that they are going to
study and reuse Skolelinux/Debian-Edu work whenever possible,
furthermore the LlureX team is willing to try to cooperate with any
similar project. However the need of a having separate distribution
still holds, partly because of some issues related with localisation
and partly because the included applications may divert.
Then Sergio went into the question of the Debian release/archiving
system and the implications it has on some important issues, as the
need for LlureX to have deadlines and independent releases, with the
relative stable updates. He analysed the possibility of maintaining an
external (i.e. non-Debian) APT repository as a temporary workaround,
waiting for better implementations of the Debian release/archive
system.
Finally he discussed the various alternatives to build a live CD. In
particular he compared the Debix [6] and the Knoppix [7] approaches,
highlight that whatever technology is chosen the most important thing
for the CDDs is to have common tools to automatically carry out this
task, without reinventing the wheel every time.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++ Open issues ++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here follows a not exhaustive list of the main issues which emerged
orthogonally in all talks and conversations and that need further
reports and discussion.
o Debconf pre-feeding approach for customising packages
o Improvements to the current Debian archive/release system
o Easy creation of custom Live CDs and installers
As these are wide topics I'll let separate post to cover them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
[0] http://www.lliurex.net/congres/cas/
[1] http://www.lliurex.net/
[2] http://www.lambdaux.com
[3] http://www.firenzetecnologia.it/
[4] http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/paper-cdd/debian-cdd.h=tml/=20
[5] http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/paper-cdd/debian-cdd.h=tml/ch-todo.en.html#s-new_ways_of_distribution
[6] http://debix.alioth.debian.org/
[7] http://www.knoppix.net
Reply to: