A few of us (indeed, the people responsible for the various sessions held last year in Extremadura in 2006) have attended the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz, Spain, from Feb. 7th to 9th.[1] Among the various sessions I personnally attended, one was dedicated to Spanish Linux distributions and turned out to be very interesting to listen. In that sesison, people responsible for various local Linux-based distributions came in and presented their distribution. This was indeed all about works funded by the various regional governments of the spanish regions: - Linex from the Region of Extremadura [2] - Max from the Autonomous community of Madrid council of education [3] - Lliurex from the region of Valencia (Generalitat valienciana) [4] - Guadalinux from the region of Andalucia [5] - Molinux from the region of Castilla-La Mancha [6] *All* of these distribution are indeed "Debian Inside" as all are Debian(4) or Ubuntu(1) based. This probably gives everybody a good idea of the user base we have in Spain (for instance, the region of Extremadura has now deployed about 80,000 workstations equipped with Linex....even though all others have a noticeably smaller user base). The most interesting part, and the one I wanted to share with you as soon as possible comes from a question I asked to the various people presenting their work, at then end of the session: "What do *you* think that *we*, Debian project, could do to make your work easier?" (the subliminal question could have also been "and not choose to base you work on something else than genuine Debian") The answers were particularly clear, indeed. Let's share: - Stability. Large-scale deployments in non-technical environments do not really expect bleeding-edge software and certainly not too quickly changing behaviour. Knut Yrvin, who was attendign too, rephrased this, from the Skolelinux experience, as "if you change the *location* of an icon on the desktop of a classroom machine, you'll get the teacher lost and lose his/her adhesion". - Release predictability All these projects are funded by public entities. The development of these derived works is based on the work of their employees and uses their budgets. Some of these budgets are related to political constraints. This gives time constraints As an informal poll, having an etch release announced in December 2006 and delayed until March 2007 seems fairly acceptable to most of them while the sarge release process has been a nightmare for some of them (which is *confirmed* by Linex developers) A 2-year release cycle is considered as pretty well adapted. - Updated kernels for the stable release The reason is pretty much obvious: support for the new hardware that pops up constantly. Most do not have big control on the nature of the hardware and basing the choice of suppliers for an entire region or country on the fact that the hardware is supported by the satble Debian release is anything but possible. Most of them use backported and more recent kernels but all of those doing this would highly prefer the well-known quality of Deian work. Having an update for stable, with a more recent kernel, happening every 9-10 months is what is judged as a good compromise. All this could help us all to discuss the release goals for lenny when the time for this will come, but I wanted to share it without forgetting. [1] http://www.freesoftwareworldconference.com/en/ [2] http://www.linex.org/ [3] http://www.educa.madrid.org/web/madrid_linux/ [4] http://www.lliurex.net/ [5] http://www.guadalinex.org/ [6] http://www.molinux.info/
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