Re: CDDs projects on Alioth
On Sat, 2004-10-09 at 03:00, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Free Ekanayaka wrote:
> > If all CDD projects where under Topic->Debian->Customising (or whaver
> > category), I would get the same result: just write in the doc "CDD
> > projects can be found here".
> This is also fine for me.
> My point of view was not very strong connected to these categories
> (perhaps I'm to directory / technical centric). Just feel free to
> fix the documentation into this direction.
I strongly disagree. All CDD projects will *never* be in Alioth. You
cannot force everyone to use Alioth. If even one project does not put
their project there, you won't be able to say in the doc "all CDDs are
here" pointing at an Alioth category page. Such an index should simply
be a manually maintained page listing all known CDDs. The Wiki is fine
for this because it is easy for people to keep the list up-to-date.
It is fine to have a recommended way to start a CDD. And I certainly
will argue that there are strong reasons both technically and socially
to start it on Alioth, but there will always be reasons, political,
technical, and otherwise, that CDD projects might want to host their
projects elsewhere. Have a good look at the "children distros" linked
below and tell me honestly that you think all of these will move to
Alioth.
> > Furthermore consider that according to
> >
> > http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros
> >
> Well, this is absolute no argument. CDD is about *reducing* the
> number of similar distributions and if you would like to take over the
> task to find out the differences of all these childrens distros, I'm
> keen on your reasons why they all make sense. I'd vote for one CDD
> for children (I do not mean education here - just for playing around)
> with the name Debian-Jr.
Please don't confuse children (people) with children (descendants in a
tree of derivatives). The above URL refers to the latter. Maybe you
haven't and you really mean the latter, but mentioning children in both
senses almost in the same breath blurs the distinction.
But yes, as Free has said, keeping all CDDs under the Alioth CDD project
is not sustainable. And yes, as you say, Andreas, there are many
distros with only subtle differences that could probably merge. But
don't overestimate how quickly that will happen. Look at the
proliferation of packages with similar purposes in Debian. I don't see
a whole lot of them merging, not the least reason for which is that
every group of developers has their own ideas, goals, and comfort
zones. So while we may make modest gains in the reduction of existing
child distros on the one hand, on the other, we will probably contribute
to the explosion of CDDs by making it trivial to create new ones.
Again, Free, it is fine to have a recommended approach (creating your
own Alioth project) and an alternate approach (making it a subtree of
the CDD project). Do you really think all 30 of the above, even
assuming they wanted to switch to Alioth, would opt for the latter? I
don't. In fact, I think it will be rather rare. If and when it starts
to become a problem, we can deal with it then.
Ben
--
Ben Armstrong <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca>
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