Re: future of Debian's derivatives efforts?
Hello pabs!
On 2018-05-01 15:10:20, Paul Wise wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have realised I haven't found the motivation & time to work on
> Debian's derivatives efforts in recent months and have been less active
> in recent years so now might be a good time to discuss the future of
> these efforts.
I don't read this mailing list very often, but thought it was important
to reply to that one message. When a fellow volunteer is in such a
situation, we should step up and say hi! :)
So first, let me tell you that your motivation, time and feelings are
more important than Debian. Take the time you need, and hopefully the
gap should be taken up by others. Failure is an option...
> I prefer this thread to be solely from Debian's perspective.
> I'll start another thread on debian-derivatives for the other side.
... and in that regard, I feel that derivatives should get more involved
in that effort. There are litterally hundreds of them just getting a
free lunch out of Debian (and yes, that's the idea, but still..) without
even coordinating among each other. *They* would benefit from closer
collaboration and extra work not only on Debian, but on the derivatives
work themselves, as they are constantly trying to solve the same
problems and duplicating a lot of efforts.
Anyways, now onto your actual questions...
> To that end, some questions:
>
> Are folks aware of our derivatives efforts?
Yes! I frequently use it to figure out "what the heck is that distro
anyways" and the wiki is a gold mine of resources.
> Do we need formal efforts around derivatives at all or
> should we just let things happen (or not) organically?
I'm not sure. I think that left to their own devices, derivatives will
not self organize. I don't understand why exactly - it seems that
everyone is in their own little thing and can't be bothered to
communicate somehow. So yes, it seems we have a shepherd role here, but
I would rather see them organize on their own.
> Has Debian found any value in our derivatives efforts?
I think we have. I especially find useful the "Ubuntu" section in the
Tracker that shows what that major derivative is doing, because I don't
always get the patches from there explicitly trickled back up. Ideally,
we'd have that for all distros but I can't even begin to imagine how
that would work...
> Which aspects of them would Debian miss if they went away?
The derivatives efforts bring some visibility to the Debian project
itself. Many derivs don't go out of their way to say they're based on
Debian, so it's important to popularize the idea that we're still a
major distro out there, and that's one of the big ways we are.
> Are there any changes we should make to our derivatives efforts?
It'd be great to find a way to encourage (or coerce? ;) derivatives to
get more deeply involved in census and coordination.
> Are there any things we should prioritise for our derivatives efforts?
It seems we should find more people to help you out, for sure. :)
> Are there any volunteers to join the derivatives efforts?
I wish I could, but I can only volunteer the occasional drive-by edit in
the wiki unfortunately.
> Are there any volunteers to organise derivatives events at DebConf18?
I am still not sure I will attend.
> I'd love to have some feedback on the new derivatives page on the
> website and if we should have links to that anywhere on the site?
>
> https://www.debian.org/derivatives/
It's a bit of a wall of text, to be honest. It would sure benefit from a
few niceties like icons, and we have tons of them we can use in this
case, although it might be tricky with some trademark issues...
I would put derivatives first and foremost: as the thing stands now, it
shows more "how to derive from debian", which is (hopefully) something
that doesn't happen that often. I would assume that most people reading
this page would more likely want to know about "Which derivatives are
available" and "Why use a derivative instead of Debian", so I would push
those to the top.
> Any other comments?
Hopefully that's been useful!
A.
--
We should act only in such away that if everyone
else acted as we do, we would accept the results.
- Emmanuel Kant
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