Dear Puredyne community,
As you might have noticed, Puredyne's development has somewhat
stalled
with our latest release being Carrot and Coriander. While still
working perfectly on most machines, this release is now pretty old.
If
you follow the list and IRC regularly you are aware that we have
been
working on a new version, Gazpacho, for a little while now, and got
as
far as an alpha release.
This alpha release was our last soup.
Truth is, some annoying bugs have held us back from releasing a new
stable Puredyne, and we have been struggling to find the time,
motivation and energy to get the job done. As a matter of fact this
is
has been delayed so much that at this point, even if we would fix
everything *right now*, this release would already be out of sync
with
upstream. You can imagine that porting, updating and patching the
same
packages over and over again is certainly frustrating.
Next to that, Carrot and Coriander is a great relase and it would be
a
pity to hack together a new version just for the sake of bumping the
version number. We would like to leave the community with a decent
soup as our final gift rather than something that could be
potentially
substandard (OK you're supposed to serve gazpacho cold, but at the
moment it looks more like a garlicky tomato soup than the famous
Andalusian dish).
Of course, we can talk in details about the technical issues we
faced
in the development of Gazpacho, the growing commercialism of Ubuntu
and the general feeling, that grew amongst some of us in the last
years, that we should instead teach people to hack their own
artistic
OS and tune it for their practice rather than provide a top-down
designed general purpose multimedia system.
All these are valid points, yet there is something else to it,
something more profound to this decision. Puredyne has been around
for
nearly a decade, it's time to let go of the project.
Nothing lasts forever, everybody moves one, interests shift, people
get jobs, get fired, resume their studies, have children (4 babies
were born in the dev group so far and another one is on the way),
etc.
Life, really.
Now, before closing the list it might be worth to mention two last
things.
First of all, Puredyne was built with a script called broth. It
lives
on top of Debian's live tools. With this script it is possible to
build all sorts of Debian or Ubuntu live distros. Every now and
then,
some of us have the need, for an installation, a workshop, a
birthday
party, to quickly generate an audiovisual oriented live
USB/DD/CD/DVD.
Broth is very handy for that, so that's why we will be still using
it,
hence possibly developing it further whenever we need it (current
version lives here: https://launchpad.net/broth ).
The second point concerns the community aspect of Puredyne. While
there is no point in keeping this list running, we want to ask you
all
if you would be interested to join a new list to keep on
talking/discussing about the practice of free software related art,
music and design (get help on installing and using distros and free
software for artistic practices, but also a place to
announce/present
your projects, look for collaborators, etc). No strings attached,
just
an idea, but one that may be useful for users/former users of
Puredyne
- based around our initial goal to support FLOSS + art practice for
ourselves and others, where we saw a gap that needed filling. Send a
mail off-list to puredyne-t...@goto10.org. If we get a few positive
responses we'll make a list and subscribe those who contacted us.
I think that's it for now.
Puredyne was a great project, we learned a lot, we had great fun. We
thank you all for supporting us and having been around all these
years.
:*
---
Puredyne@goto10.org
http://identi.ca/group/puredyne
irc://irc.goto10.org/puredyne
