Re: Branding as separate distro vs. add-on to Debian

[Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com>]

On Jun 10, 2011, at 08:38, Andreas Tille wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 12:37:04PM -0400, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
>> 
>> I work on Debathena, which packages MIT's Project Athena clients
> 
> Any reason not to build these as official Debian / Ubuntu packages?

When I was working at MIT there was a project called SIPB Debian. Sam Hartman worked a lot on it back in 2002 or so. They created a copy of MIT's Athena environment or rather integrated Athena into SIPB Debian. Is Debathena built on that work? if so, perhaps using regular "official" Debian packages and packaging process might be a good approach as I know this was the approach taken with SIPB Debian. 
> 
>> as well  
>> as configuration for network logins, integration with MIT's 
>> authentication infrastructure, etc.
> 
> ... and do the configuration using proper debconf usage?
> 
>> We often see people confused about Debathena as a separate OS, with  
>> comments like "I already installed Ubuntu and I don't want to  
>> triple-boot".
> 
> This confusion could be solved if the packages would be official Debian
> / Ubuntu.

1+

Jeremiah