Redesigning Debian as a metadistro
Title 1: Downstreaming Debian on purpose
Title 2: Redesigning Debian as a metadistro
Title 3: Debian encouraging derivatives
* TL;DR : Encourage Debian derivatives officially. At the same time
setup or develop some tools to make derivatives work more direct (Live
CDs, Installer, Archive) and document how they have to use it. Finally
make sure that these same tools makes it far more easy than today for
derivatives to contribute their own customisations and packages back to
Debian.
* Introduction
As a newcomer in Debian I find that, almost any Human project actually,
Debian is very Debian-centric. Probably you might think that my idea is
the wrong one. The wrong method to use or the wrong path to walk.
* Debian (centric) view on derivatives
The Debian centric view on derivatives consists on encouraging
derivatives to work as much as possible into Debian itself.
** Have you a custom package that only your Derivative uses ? Make sure
it makes it into Debian.
** Has your Live CD a feature that makes it special? Please contribute
back to Debian Live project.
* Turning around Debian centric view
So the main idea not focusing so much about people contributing back
directly to Debian but rather to encourage people to make Debian
derivatives. So, yes, that's basically it.
* About tools for enabling Debian derivatives
So the big problem here is that there is no tool for making a Debian
derivative. I mean, I suppose there is such tools. I know live-build
which uses also live-boot so that you can make a Debian Live cd. There's
probably a tool for making Debian cds. And you know there might be other
tools.
However my point here is that there is not an official guide or a set of
recommended tools to encourage people to, somehow, fork Debian, and make
their own derivatives.
So, currently if we take a look at the 'Derivatives Guidelines' wiki
page (https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Guidelines) and 'Derivatives'
wiki page (https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives) we don't see any
explicit encouragement that Derivatives uses a set of tools. We can find
a project about Merging derived distributions back to Debian (Who did
not expect that? You are Debian centric, aren't you ;) ?). And if we
look at how to De-/Re-branding so there are some files that you are
supposed to handle manually.
So Debian as a distro enforces the use of tools (in the broad meaning of
term) which are the postint, preinst scripts on Debian packages on how
to deal with new programs on your system. But when it comes to advice
derivates it says: Oh, here there are some files that you might
interested on changing. Figure out how on your own.
* Recommended Tools / Howtos that should be there
** How to make a derivative live cd from a Debian Live CD.
** How to make a derivative with your own repositories
** How to make a derivative with mixed Debian and your own repositories
** How to make your Debian-CD (your installer disk) out of your repositories
* Why Debian should do that ?
So if you are a Debian developer you will ask yourself. Why do we have
to do so many stuff ? This will not help Debian because it will not be
as easy as it is now to get back changes or improvements from the
Derivatives to Debian. Because we basically encourage to do the work
outside Debian itself.
Well, I haven't finished my explanation. Here there comes the metadistro
concept. Around 2006 in Spain metadistros was a project that aimed at
joining efforts around distributions makers. One or tools from there
were known for making it easier to build your own distro from a Debian
or an Ubuntu basis.
So what I mean here is that I recommend you to develop these recommended
tools. The idea is that these tools would be able to easily generate a
patch (or set of patches) or whatever. Later on you can integrate it
back into Debian.
So if you make a tool that builds a derivative live cd out of a Debian
Live CD the special --contribute-back-to-debian switch will generate
these patches, these tree of custom packages with their own source
Debian packages, etc.
Well, I'm not an expert, you probably know (Because of the Debian
derivatives patch current effort) what you want to back to Debian.
* Distro ranking
If I have not convinced you yet I will say that in some specialised
sites they measure the distros health by the number of derivatives.
These new tools would, for sure, encourage derivatives while, as I have
said, enabling an easy way of handling efforts from derivatives back to
Debian.
---
So that's it. As you might guess from this email I think that Debian
Derivatives effort is a very good one. But in my humble opinion it lacks
what I have described here to be a complete nexus between Derivatives
and Debian.
adrian15
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