Re: Debian-edu/Skolelinux and Edubuntu cooperation

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

* Halvor Dahl 

(For those who don't know me: I'm both a Debian Developer, was heavily
involved in the initial development of debian-installer, Skolelinux
and am now also an Ubuntu developer as leader of the amd64 team there.)

| Ubuntu may sound like the right answer, but what is the question?
| In my opinion, it is "How do we get control over our release
| process?" and not "What distro should we chose?".

(This is written with my Skolelinux hat on, not any of my other
colourful ones. :-)

I'm a bit wary of going for Ubuntu for Debian-edu as it stands now.
Ubuntu has a six month release cycle with releases being supported for
18 months.  This is fairly short and would in practice require the
the sysadmin to upgrade the system every year.  It would also require
us to produce a new release every year.  

For this reason, I think going with Ubuntu, at the moment, would be a
mistake.  If (or when) Ubuntu releases a version with extended support
(say, three years) with a promise to release a new version with three
years support within two years, I think revisiting the question could
be useful.  Two and three years are just example numbers, they could
just as easy be three and four or some other numbers.

Note that there has been a bit of discussion in the Ubuntu community
on doing such releases, mainly to satisfy enterprise customers.  This
would however also benefit us a lot.  Combined with the discussion
around making Debian-edu a bit less bound to Debian itself, I think we
could make a really, really nice platform for schools, whether it be
based on Ubuntu or Debian itself.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-