[ full quote to the benefit of -blends@lists.d.o ]
Hi José, thanks for this information.
On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 06:36:01PM -0500, José Miguel Parrella Romero wrote:
On 2007 I was hired by EDELCA, a power utility in Venezuela, to design
and develop a Debian-based distribution to be used in up to 7,000 PCs
nationwide, due to an internal policy of cost reductions and promotion
of FLOSS usage and development.
DSLv2 (Distribución de Software Libre) was born as a derivative, with a
copy of the repository (much in a Ubuntu's "universe" fashion) and a
local repository with some 1,000 packages. About 15% of the repository
was developed locally (patches to existing packages, and .deb versions
of non-distributable non-FLOSS non-native packages such as SAP GUI)
Interesting additions included full LDAP integration with offline PAM
support (nss-db, pam-ccreds), automatic daily updates leveraging a meta
package and integration with two Puppet realms. The distribution ended
up installed in about 2,000 workstations.
The specific procedures for configuration were documented elsewhere, the
installer was preseeded (fully unattended, based on optical and USB
media due to a very complex network out of our reach) and arguably too
few bugs and/or patches were sent back to Debian. However one of the
employees was mentored by me and devotes some time to Debian.
EDELCA, the main power utility in the country, and one of the most
important worldwide (operates some of the biggest hydro dams) also uses
Debian server-side in Caracas and Puerto Ordaz, operating mail services
as well as proxies, VPNs, web servers, DNS/DHCP, LDAP servers et al.
I left EDELCA on 2008 and AFAICT the project was stalled, but there are
lots of users around, and several shortcomings (for example the need of
automatic updating along with Debian) and in my particular opinion such
a small, privately-developed derivative can't survive with 10% or more
of their packaging developed in-house.
That is a pity, I think they should consider becoming a Debian Pure
Blend, even though I don't know if the changes they performed are
reconcilable or not. If EDELCA is interested in pursuing the
possibility, they should probably get in touch with
debian-derivatives@lists.d.o, which I'm Cc:-ing on this follow-up.
I don't know who is in charge right now, and thus may be a proper point
of contact, but I'm CCing Miguelangel Freitas from the end-user distro
and Víctor Oñate from the Server side. I don't mind being a point of
contact for DSLv2 at this moment.