On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 08:28:02PM +1100, Karl Goetz wrote:
> What we were talking about in the meeting was how many places a
> distribution has to modify branding strings and images for their use.
> It was brought up by pabs' observation that a lot of the changes
> derivatives have are purely cosmetic.
>
> Rather then changing (for example) base-files, base-artwork and
> desktop-artwork-<environment>, you have to modify huge numbers of
> packages to change logos, desktops, and other things that could really
> be consolidated. Example: Why should a derivative need to remove a
> Debian logo from gnome, kde, base-files, synaptic/software sources, etc
> when it could be included once in base-files (or a new
> package base-branding, or whatever) which all other packages then use.
> When looking at the list of packages which also say Debian as a string
> (eg grub, web browsers, ...) the list grows again.
I see. That's indeed a very nice idea. It'd go in the direction of
spreading best practices to re-brand Debian derivatives, something which
we started documenting in the wiki, but that could clearly be made
easier centralizing the needed changes in as few packages as possible.
Related to the above: we have in the past complained with some upstreams
(most notably Canonical) that their software was hard to de-/re-brand.
Taking steps to make it easier to do with our own distro stuff would be
coherent with that old complaint of ours.
I guess the first step for this would be contact the relevant
desktop-related teams (e.g. GNOME, KDE, LXDE, etc. +
debian-desktop@lists.d.o).
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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