On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 08:19:10AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: > Is there any reason to do this outside Debian or would you consider > tp follow the path of Debian-Junior who is supporting "the other end > of the age scale" ;-) _INSIDE_ Debian. Your are asking on a list that > is about doing customisations _inside_ Debian!
while i fully support pushing to include everything entirely within Debian, i think it's important to acknowledge that *sometimes* it may actually be better to develop a proof of concept outside of Debian first. i think debian-edu (a.k.a. skolelinux) is a fine example of this, and it's clearly made huge progress towards full integration within Debian proper, but it still doesn't meet a strict definition of a custom debian distribution (a handful of packages and the CD/DVD images are outside of Debian still). but the intention is clearly and genuinely to integrate into debian, and that's what i think really matters. working outside of debian has has pros and cons, the biggest con being the very real risk of good ideas never actually making it back into Debian. that's not to be taken lightly. there's also the possibility of duplicated work. on the other hand, i think you can't also disregard the power in the enthusiasm of getting something working *right now* vs. waiting for some changes to get accepted within Debian, which can be an unreasonably long wait sometimes. waiting for bug fixes, some new version or new package uploaded, slow buildd's stalling progress to testing, whatever ... can discourage people from making good progress that might be integrated into Debian. either way, we *might* loose improvements to Debian. there are so many similarities in the issues that derivatives and custom debian distributions face that it seems important to me to encourage cooperation and collaboration between the various projects, even if they do not make the same choices and priorities. in the end, yes, it's *great* to fix it within Debian, but i hope we can envision ways to help derivatives transition into fully fledged custom distributions. BOF at debconf8, anyone? :) live well, vagrant -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]