Howdy,
while I'm not a DD, let me join the club of DDD (debating derivative
designers). The distro is called SPACEflight. Its main purpose is to serve as
an all-in-one demonstration and experimentation system for Internet of
Services technologies, which can be considered a rather young research area
and thus still somewhat blurry. In traditional wording, the distro includes a
tiny self-contained Internet on it with clients and servers and management
infrastructure in between. Technically, it contains just additional packages,
although it will soon also receive experimental modifications in KDE packages
so that it only almost meets the definition of a pure blend. Maybe "impure
blend" would be the right term here :-)
Website and introduction:
http://serviceplatform.org/wiki/SPACEflight
Given the special-purpose nature of this distro, I doubt it will ever have a
sizeable number of users, but this doesn't preclude it from sharing the same
technical autobuilding and integration issues which major derivatives have.
For example, asynchronous database configuration is still weak in Debian, as
is Unicode support in many places. Also, it just occurred to me that instead
of adding an APT source, updating and installing some packages, there could be
a command which does all of this in one go, just out of convenience. I've
previously reported on some specific issues, with, ehm, mixed feedback volume:
* http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/06/msg00895.html
* http://serviceplatform.org:8000/trac/browser/packaging/doc/webcontext-
common-draft
* several bugs from http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=2005@kuarepoti-dju.net
The distro media are built automatically, but there are also some weaknesses
with this process, for instance debconf asks each time about the locales
despite having a seed for this question which blows the otherwise non-
interactive build process. Most of the issues are already or will be filed as
bug reports.
Which leaves this list mostly for coordination discussion which cannot easily
be solved within a single bugtracker. For example, why are the kernel names
differing between Debian and Ubuntu. In this particular aspect, I side with
Ubuntu because they have nice generic names ("linux-image") independent from
kernel version and architecture (e.g., "linux-image-2.6-amd64") so that I get
the right kernel whereever I run my build scripts. Making such aspects more
uniform between potential base distributions would increase the re-use factor
of derivative creation infrastructures.
Debian packaging information for SPACE is available from:
http://serviceplatform.org/wiki/Package_Repository
Josef