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Debian Libre - blend/pureblend/derivative?



Hi!

I build and publish Debian Live ISO images from a GitLab pipeline for a
couple of flavors arm64/amd64 gnome/standard/slim made without any
non-free software, and just made 13.2.0 images available from here:

https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/debian-libre/debian-libre-live

I want to explore formalizing this contribution somehow.  I was reading
the Debian Pure Blends manual -- https://blends.debian.org/blends/ --
and would like to hear what people think about going down this route for
Debian Libre.  What do you think?

I'm not familiar with the terminology and processes around Blends, so
I'm looking for guidance on what make sense, what is easily possible,
what could be possible with more work, what would be controversial, and
what would be a bad idea.  I see the manual describe how to become a
Debian Pure Blends, but I'm not even at the stage where I know if that
even make sense.

I can see some paths forward:

1) Debian Libre as a Debian Pure Blend.  As far as I can tell, this
isn't that far away, the images serves a purpose for a special group of
target users.  Could this be considered a Debian Pure Blend already?
What is missing to become officially blessed?

2) Adding more libre-oriented packages, such as GNU Linux-Libre:
https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

  2a) Is it "permitted" for a Debian Pure Blends to configure additional
  non-debian.org archives to fetch packages from?  Is that what makes it
  a "non-Pure" Blend?

  2b) Could linux-libre be added to Debian properly?  I suppose some
  work to reduce duplication of kernel code would be required.  Has
  including linux-libre been discussed before, and was there any
  conclusive outcome of that?

3) Thoughts on making a Debian derivative?  I experiment with something
similar with DiffOS - https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/diffos - but
DiffOS's goal is a FSDG-compliant Debian derivative, which isn't
necessarily Debian Libre's goal.  So maybe Debian Libre could be a
Debian-internal Blend that will use the Debian archive and not go
further than that?  I don't think Debian Libre could ever be
FSDG-compliant because of the non-free stuff in Debian.  What are the
rules around naming, would it even be okay to call a derivate 'Debian
Libre' or would that be confusing things around what is Debian?

All of this just grow out (and cater for) my own 25+ year old
self-hosting sysadmin setup, but if someone else is similarily inclined
to work on this, I could certainly use help.

Happy hacking,
/Simon

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