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Re: The term "Custom Debian Distribution" (Was Re: [custom] The term "flavor" and encouraging work on Debian)



On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 01:24:24PM +0200, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> If some of the people who participated in the Debcamp Custom
> Distribution BOF (see
> http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-nonprofit/News/2003/20030717) are
> listening, perhaps you could elaborate? (Cc'ing Mako Hill since he
> was referenced as one of the driving forces behind the meeting.)
> 
> It might be hard, impossible and undesirable to reverse the decision to
> use the term. I think the term can be correctly understood if you
> present it as I have in some recent postings to this list:
> 
> Debian is the super-project.
>         XYZ is a Debian subproject
>         that produces a Custom Debian Distribution
>                 with the flavors A, B and C.

Right.

Your other posts seems well informed. Subprojects is already defined
for us (see http://www.debian.org/devel/ for an example of one
place). Debian-NP is clearly a subproject as is Debian-Med and
the IPv6 project.

If you apt-get install the subproject-howto you will get something
talking *only* about creating a custom Debian-distribution -- not
about creating a subproject for any other sort of work. The folks at
the BOF saw a real lack of interaction between the people making
custom distributions and we attributed this, in part, to the fact that
we didn't have a single concept around which identify and say, "yeah,
that person is doing the same thing as me, we should work together."
The flavors people were not working with the metadistros people and
the subproject people where on their own.

We thought "Custom Debian Distribution" (and a [custom] tag in emails
to -devel until a list is created) both referenced our relationship to
Debian (we're inside) and described what we were trying to do in a way
that was not so restrictive that it couldn't refer to multiple
technologies but not so broad that it would apply to projects with
very different types of goals.

I think we left with the idea that "flavors" or "metadistros" and the
like may still describe *technologies* or methods which one could use
to achieve a Custom Distro.

I think this is in line with what AJ, yourself, and others have said --
which is nice. :)

> More ideas? Perhaps some of this could be intergrated into the Debian
> Subproject Howto as soon as some degree of consensus has been reached.
> (I can't find it right now with people.d.o being inaccessible.)

I think it absolutely should. I also think the HOWTO should be renamed
or expanded in scope to bring it into alignment with the consensus that
seems to be coalescing around these issues.

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako@debian.org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/

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