Hello! I went yesterday giving a talk at Firenze World Vision (www.firenzeworldvision.it) about Custom Debian Distributions and Debian-NP. The slides of my talk are found, as usual, at http://people.debian.org/~enrico/talks At the end of the talk, Stefano Zacchiroli made me an interesting and challenging question: "Is Debian-NP something like a meta distro that can be instantiated to the various different and diverse NP needs?" The question struck me. It was a good question. It had something right, and something that was not it, so I started answering: "Yes, and no." But then, damn me, when you answer "yes, and no" then you have to give not one, but two answers. So I said, without thinking: "Yes, in that we already have a meta distro that can be instantiated to the various different and diverse needs of anyone, and that is Debian, and Debian-NP is Debian" "And no, we are not making a distribution to be instantiated: we are more like the ones that instantiate, and teach people how to instantiate" Wow! I had never thought about it in that way! Very interesting answer... I need to talk with that speaker later! Oh, but it's me... Oh, my, I'm sick... "...by the way, thanks for the question, it's been really helpful to me..." I really like that answer, and I think it's exactly what we should do: - Real development, we do it with the Debian hat. - With the Debian-NP hat, we forget about being able to write code, and we work with people. The most technical things we should do with a Debian-NP hat would be select packages, configure them and burn CDs. Our work should be make it easier for people to install and maintain systems in non profits. If we start with a CD with the right selection of software in it, starting from there is already easier, because you spend less time in making selections every time. Then, as infrastructure develops, we document it, teach people how to burn custom CDs, make starting points, understand the requirements better and select different software, and all those things we always wanted to do. Plus one thing: with the Debian-NP hat, we also have the task of representing non-profits and their efforts in the Debian community: we are the part of Debian that knows (or is supposed to know) about them. How about a package debian-np-devel that depends on CDD tools, debpartial-mirror and whatnot, and includes documentation about how we evaluated and selected packages, experience reports, best practices, CD building howtos, tips on how to indentify your needs, web links, contacts of people actively working in building new and interesting software, directory of what NGOs did what and how, and how to contact them to ask how it goes; gathers bugs and wishes in the BTS (possibly we could say "if you don't know where to report your bug, report it to debian-np, and we take care of triaging and reassigning it"), and so on? Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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