Re: Debian derivatives census: activity ping
Hi,
> If you are receiving this mail that means you are participating in the
> Debian derivatives census[1] and that your entry may have an issue.
>
> According to your census entry, your distribution is inactive or was last
> active quite a while ago. If your distribution is now active, please mark
> it as active and add today as the date your distribution was last active.
aptosid has been active, but not active enough to bother editing the consensus
wiki entry at a glance. The consensus template contains so many attributes
that are not provided by the aptosid derivative and/or its infrastructure.
>
> You may also want to use this opportunity to share your thoughts with
> us; perhaps your plans for the coming year, plans for integrating your
> work into Debian or issues you may have come across in collaborating
> with Debian.
As far as I'm aware, and I'm not currently a very active developer, there are
no plans other than to continue adapting to changes in Debian/unstable and
provide the same constant flow of repository updates and infrequent live
media releases.
2012 was a peculiar year for aptosid, it managed only a single live media
release (~3/4 were scheduled). Volatility in Debian (changes in sysvinit),
Linux kernel (unioning of filesystems, general stability, hardware support)
and especially lack of man power/hours were the major reasons.
Our community has shrunk: IRC channel chatter/nick count have lessened and
the forums are less frequently posted to. In spite of this trend the group of
people who maintain the derivative have all maintained a healthy relationship
but some of this group are just a bit too busy with real life to contribute
as much as in previous years.
Personally, if I had more time to work toward some kind of small aptosid
related goals, I'd look at further development of the infrastructure related to
the live media:-
* re-evaluating if debian-live can drop-in replace our current live media
infrastructure with an acceptable amount of effort
* further development/refactor of our existing live media infrastructure
to provide a well documented, more sanely coded base for collaborative
development than what we have now
* a simpler/smarter initramfs hook for booting the live media
* support for alternate init/boot softwares other than sysvinit/initscripts
* alternative distribution release media formats - moving away from iso images
and compressed filsystems and all the limitations and complexity that they
impose on the live media boot process
* re-evaluate the current state of networking utilities and their interfaces
As for integrating these changes back into Debian, well I co-maintain sysvinit
and startpar in Debian so boot related stuff can be worked on rather
naturally (if I were more motivated than last year or two).
Other problems I or my aptosid peers come across usually result in a
standard bts bug report if it hasn't already been done so by the wider
community. We don't bother usertagging or tracking these bug reports or
anything like that because they are, in the grand scheme of things, too few
and far between to bother.
Other members of aptosid have their own personal pet interests such as the
continued development and maintenance of the user manual and its many
translations (Trevor Walkley/bluewater), the artwork (Rick Battle/detaos) or
Linux hacking (Stephan/slh) if asked on IRC those three may have some
interesting things to talk about in those realms, among others.
Thanks, Kel
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