Hi, On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 04:50:14PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > > 3. In Debian we have a number of great sub-projects which are not properly > > exposed even within Debian itself. I have once suggested to float all > > the blends up to the main Debian page to make it at once look appealing > > and specific to a broad range of specialists. But I failed to generalize > > the proposal, so it hasn't worked out yet. > > I like a lot the idea of providing links to blends from the Debian > homepage [1], thanks for proposing (and revamping) the idea! However, > from the above paragraph I do not understand what you needed to > generalize and why it is blocking the implementation of the proposal. > Can you be more specific about that?
As you can probably assume I'm in favour of making Blends more popular and thus I in principle support the idea to make them visible on the main Debian page. However, my concern is of a bit different nature than yours (web page design). The problem we have is that while three Blends are working nicely and fully adopted the idea (namely Debian Edu, Debian Med and Debian Science) and people are actively working with the existing tools as well as having understood the idea we have currently projects which I would call "potential" Blends. There are for instance Debian Jr (actually the first Blend) which is orphaned - my regular pings at relevant places were not answered by anybody and currently the only sign of Debian Jr is SPAM on its mailing list. (Well, OK, I updated the metapackages if needed - but that's no project work.) We also have Debian Lex which is more or less a stub. It would not be really helpful if you would direct lawyers onto this project - except if it will be made really clear that this is a place for developers but not for users. We have Debian Accessibility which is using the tasks pages but do not want to use the metapackages and do not really identify itself as a Blend. As long as the main drivers of a project do not adopt the idea (see below) I'm hesitating to advertise them as Blends. Than we have those projects which are rather packaging projects which I tried to convince adopting the ideas of a Blend. These are Debian GIS (just convinced them to do conversation on a list named debian-gis rather than pkg-grass), Debian Multimedia (some people there consider the idea of Blends cool but there is not much effort done to really maintain a complete Multimedia system but rather a set of single packages), DebiChem (where one main supporter is happy about the Blends approach but has time constraints), Pkg-Games which did not even started working on Blends stuff, but IMHO would have great potential becoming a Blend (and could even copy / adopt Debian Jr). So the question is: What Blend is actually worth beeing mentioned on the main page? >From my point of view the point of Blends is that we technicans understand that it is not enough to simply add technically perfect packages one after the other to a flat package pool. We need some substructure and this substructure needs to be organised and actively maintained. If we approach this we can reach much more in the following real live cases: 1. Contacting upstream authors (perhaps about fixing their licence): a) Single maintainer: Hi, I'm Joe Random Debianpackager and would like you to ... b) Blends maintainer: Hi, I'm writing you on behalf of <Blend> name. The Blend has the purpose to establish your software into a complete framework with programs covering the field <Blend-field>. If you think your program fits well into this Blend amongst ... could you please ... 2. User asks you: If I want to do the following task, what software should I install? a) No substructur via Blend: I would suggest to install packages a, b, and c. Furthermore it might be useful to install d or e as you want. Also f is interesting. ... b) Blend: Just install metapackage x and your system is ready prepared. 3. Some journalist asks you as an outsider of a specific field about solutions in this field. a) No substructure: Well, I have heard that there should be some packages amongst those 29.000 Debian packages which might be useful. b) Existing Blend: I'm no expert in this field but I know there is a team inside Debian which actively cares exactly for these issues. Please contact this team (via Mailinglist) to get more detailed information. There are a lot more examples why such a substructure is helpful. IMHO it is one way to advertise Debian. I would go that far that Debian can grow dendritic into different fields and spreads over different fields into the masses (and thus is "the last final step for total world domination" - to quote Enrico). We could even declare Debian as an application store for applications in the fields covered by Blends. You know that I'm driving Debian Med since 9 years. Honestly, I think medicine is a quite unimportant field compared what's there in Free Software for Multimedia, Games, GIS and others. Medicine has even an additional problem: The users tend to be quite conservative regarding their software and usually have some money left to not care much about license fees. So my point here is: If it is possible to build a Blend inside this niche field - how much more success could other topics have if people would be more engaged in running a Blend? Blends could be a way to make sure that the following dialogue could be quite frequent: User 1: What Linux distribution should I use if I'm engaged in workfield X. User 2: Use Debian. I think for X=Medicine and X=Education we are almost there. So why are we not in other fields where this could happen? You might even ask: Debian has so many packages - do we really need so many quite specific packages with low popcon. The usual answer is: If the packages are properly maintained and bug free - why not. For proper maintenance we are "hiring" developers out of this specific field. We have (at least! - I should make a poll about this) five Debian developers which are *only* in the project *because* Debian Med exists (some more are in NM queue). These people would not have joined Debian otherwise but they became engaged because we are caring for their topic and they see the advantage. This includes proper training of packaging and having a warm welcome for engaged people. Yes, this all is work. It is different work than all this technical packaging fun. You need people who like to do this work. If you do not like to do it in your own Blend try to catch some other people who understood the idea and bring in their time to manage a Blend. Uhm, that's a long mail - just to say: I'm fine with pushing Blends to the main page if we can be sure that we will not list stubs there but really living projects who are obliged to the Blends idea - not only the pure technical part. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110411213317.gg16...@an3as.eu