Debian's relationship with the various distributions derived from
Debian and approach to existing and new derivatives has had a wide
range of states. Most derivatives recieve indifference from Debian.
There has been animosity from Debian towards some derivatives. We have welcomed the creation of derivatives. We have welcomed developers from derivatives into Debian packaging teams. We have encouraged people to
start blends within Debian instead of starting derivatives.
What do you think of Debian's current relationship with derivatives?
What would you like to change about our relationships?
What do you feel Debian's current approach to derivatives is?
What would you like to change about that approach?
What is your favourite derivative?
Would you like to see it merged into Debian?
Thoughts on identical Debian pure blends vs derivatives?
Other thoughts welcome, as are thoughts from non-candidates.
Debian's relationship with the various distributions derived from
Debian and approach to existing and new derivatives has had a wide
range of states. Most derivatives recieve indifference from Debian.
There has been animosity from Debian towards some derivatives. We have welcomed the creation of derivatives. We have welcomed developers from derivatives into Debian packaging teams. We have encouraged people to
start blends within Debian instead of starting derivatives.
What do you think of Debian's current relationship with derivatives?
What would you like to change about our relationships?
What do you feel Debian's current approach to derivatives is?
What would you like to change about that approach?
What is your favourite derivative?
Would you like to see it merged into Debian?
Thoughts on identical Debian pure blends vs derivatives?
Other thoughts welcome, as are thoughts from non-candidates.
Is that the kind of indifference you're referring to?
Or do we need better interfaces with them all together?
I'm guessing that you're speaking about derivatives like Ubuntu and
Devuan. I think enough people are familiar with the complexities behind those so I won't go into them now, but are there any specific animosity
with a derivative that we could've avoided that I might not know about?
we list Ubuntu information in our QA pages (like which version they
carry, whether there's bugs filed, patches, etc).
Do you think the derivatives team could do something like host a video
call, inviting all derivatives who would like to submit feedback about
every 6 months or so? Then at least some more people from both sides
could get to know the people on the other side, and likely some problems
can get solved too.
Well, I'll admit that I'm a bit ignorant on our biggest problems with
our relationships with our derivatives.
Can I through this question back to you and ask you to share some of
your insight and concerns?
I suppose our approach to derivatives is quite similar to our users, we through all these source and binary packages and isos out there and then everyone gets to fend for themselves. Sure, we do have documentation and some support channels, but for the most part there's not lots of hand
holding involved.
Also, do you think that's a problem?
One improvement I'd like to see is PPAs.
It would also be nice to offer some infrastructure to build their installation media for them. All of this might make it easier for them
to get started, and also, perhaps create a smaller delta towards
becoming a pure blend if it makes sense to do so.
Not sure if you're familiar with extrepo?
What is your favourite derivative?
I'll go with Kali Linux, I think they're a good example of a good derivative.
Would you like to see it merged into Debian?
I'm quite ambivalent really ... especially if it's going to cause
some friction.
Plus, right now we're in trouble with our live build infrastructure, so currently for testing we're not even building our own live images, it's pretty much where my technical work will be focused on in the immediate future, and I hope that we'll have non-x86 live images for bookwork and
also a live image for debian-jr, but now I'm getting a bit side-tracked :)
Thoughts on identical Debian pure blends vs derivatives?
Not sure I understand the question?
Are there pure blends and derivatives that are identical to each
other?
Well, we've talked about this a few times over the years. In 2012 in Nicaragua you first introduced me to the derivatives team, and the derivatives census. I never contributed to it much but I still think
it's important work. I've been on the distro side to and found it
valuable because the census also checks that some things in the distro
is configured correctly for that derivative (like the origins data).
Last I spoke to you, I think you also said that you don't have much time
to work on this anymore, and that the distro census is probably going to
die down. Is this still the status? Do you think it can be saved? We probably have quite a wide audience here, do you think it's worth
another shot to get people involved to work on it?
On Sun, 2022-03-27 at 18:05 +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
Last I spoke to you, I think you also said that you don't have much
time to work on this anymore, and that the distro census is probably
going to die down. Is this still the status? Do you think it can be
saved? We probably have quite a wide audience here, do you think
it's worth another shot to get people involved to work on it?
The census has been turned off for years. It is too much work for one
person to do on their own. I don't have motivation or time or ability
to do it alone any more. I have tried to recruit other folks to work
on both the social and technical sides of it. I had an Outreachy
intern that did some great work. I had some interest in contributing
from both DDs and non-DDs but the interest didn't result in the sort
of ongoing contributions that are needed. I've had encouragement for
keeping the census around from a couple of folks though. I'm also not
sure the Debian community thinks the approach is correct or even
useful to Debian itself and also for derivatives themselves; the
mailing list and IRC channel are mostly silent for years. There are
also some solvable technical flaws that mean the census cron can't be
turned back on right now, and the motivation issues block fixing them.
Not sure if you're familiar with extrepo?
As I understand it, extrepo is more for things like the Mozilla Firefox
or PostgreSQL repositories than things like Ubuntu? Probably a
discussion for the extrepo maintainer, or potentially there is room for
an extrepo extension containing apt configs/keys for derivatives,
perhaps pulled from the census. As an example of where this would be
useful, I'm pulling the Ubuntu census apt config into a chdist so I can
list Ubuntu package versions etc on the command-line.
What do you think of Debian's current relationship with derivatives?
What would you like to change about our relationships?
What do you feel Debian's current approach to derivatives is?
What would you like to change about that approach?
What is your favourite derivative?
Would you like to see it merged into Debian?
Thoughts on identical Debian pure blends vs derivatives?
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