Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
If you find that you'd rather that some of those uses could be generalized - i.e. that it might make good sense for Debian as a system and community to develop and maintain support for some of the uses you tinker with on your own - _then_ bring them up on this list and let's discuss how to proceed. Hope that makes sense, and is not perceived as too harsh,
Not at all. Your responses have been among the most courteous I've received in looking for an appropriate forum.
You referred me to https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends#Terminology. That was one of the pages that suggested I try the debian-blends list.
What I'm aiming at would very literally, with the narrowest possible interpretation, meet "a subset of Debian that is configured to support a particular target group out-of-the-box."
Characteristics of the target group are:1. No network capability physically exists. Installation &/or upgrades will be done
using optical media or flash drives.2. Each machine is physically isolated, serves a single user and has a single function. 3. One volunteer will be supervising a set of machines of widely different capability. This implies that the majority of automatic hardware detection will be disabled in the installer in order that set of machines will "react" in common manner across
the set.4. Minimizing installed foot print is desired. That is a general guideline to follow when making choices (prefer few vs many, simple vs complex, small vs large).
This runs contrary to the mindset that Debian (and all Linuxes) have inherited from Unix of all machines being networked as a multi user multi tasking multi function ...
These are real constraints faced by actual Debian users. I've had feedback as I've poked around trying to solve my own problems.