Re: future of Debian's derivatives efforts?
On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 6:02 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> I am sure there are other great uses that I myself simply haven't realized
> yet (i.e. I wouldn't exactly _miss_ them - so arguably off topif of your
> question ;-) ).
Some data points:
LWN editors are following Planet Debian Derivatives.
Some folks have used parts of the code to lint their own apt repos.
Some folks have looked at the generated patches.
> Gather geolocation for derivatives with a geographic scope, and geo-mapping
> (i.e. visualization e.g. on a slippy map) - both to encourage collaboration
> across derivatives, and to aid "missionaries" like myself organize journeys.
The census template already includes a location field:
* Location: based in City, Country | based in Country | focused on
serving users/customers in Country | developers are in Country |
completely international
https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/CensusTemplate
That is meant to be human rather than machine readable.
To make it machine readable, we could make locations into links to geo: URIs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_URI_scheme
> I volunteer to setup and maintain a slippy map, if that is of interest.
> Already have similar setups I can adapt, so should not be too much work.
There used to be a map.debian.net website created by Iain R.
Learmonth, he stopped running the site but published his code. I'd
suggest starting from that instead of from scratch.
https://github.com/irl/debian-map
There is a list of possible future data sources for a Debian map here:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianLocations
For derivatives info, I'd have the census extract the data from the
derivatives info, aggregate and publish it, similar to how the Planet
Debian Derivatives stuff works.
> I looked briefly at the scripts to maintain patches, and can maybe offer to
> help there - if Perl and shell code is ok (I notice both being present but
> Python being dominant, but didn't see any notice whether there's a
> preference or any code is equally appreciated for that).
I welcome all help with the derivatives efforts.
I think I used Perl because I couldn't find RSS autodiscovery
libraries for Python at the time.
I used shell where most of the code was just running other programs.
Both Perl and shell have sharp edges so I'd prefer to avoid them.
Python also has sharp edges but they are less pervasive.
> When first looking at it (in early 2011, I think) it felt too formal to me -
> intuitively it felt unwelcoming to me. I have since, through my hundreds of
> meetings with derivatives, learned how a more casual approach can be easily
> misunderstood and effectively *less* welcoming. Amazing work!
Interesting, thanks for expressing that.
I don't remember entirely, but I think I figured that, since for many
or most organisations behind derivatives, we don't have (much of) an
existing relationship with them so a formal approach is more "proper".
Of course, both casual and formal approaches can co-exist.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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