Hi, I would like to add some notes to this thread from the developer team's point of view.
First of all, I sort of understand your concerns about the switch to Ubuntu, but I think some of you have over reacted a bit. There are several reasons for the change to Ubuntu. One of them has been put very accurately by maconulaff in the previous post. I really think that as an open source project, one of the factors to quantify its success is the number of users. As he said, the Ubuntu market presents a much larger target for potential users of eBox. At the end of the day what we want is more users switching from their proprietary solutions to open source products like eBox. Do not forget that the more users the more testing eBox will get, hence its quality will increase, and we all will benefit from this by having a more solid and tested product. But please, don't panic. Let me explain how we are going to deal with this change. In first place I would like to explain why we decided to change. As you know, we were shipping eBox along Debian Sarge. Debian Etch has been out for a year now. We planned to switch to Etch which obviously involves some effort. However, before summer 2007, one of the Ubuntu developers started to work on packaging eBox for Ubuntu. You have to keep in mind that we are a VERY small dev team. So we thought that we should take advantage of this work. You really appreciate those kinds of efforts when you have scarce resources :) This work plus the idea stated above about reaching more users helped us make such a decision. However, this does not mean we abandon Debian forever. This means that with the resources we have right now, we will focus on Ubuntu as our platform for the next few months. But, after dealing with the Ubuntu packaging these days, we have realised that it's pretty feasible to support both distributions. On the technical side, there are just a few things which are different. The problem is we can't commit to officially support both at the same time right now, unless some volunteers step in to help. If nobody helps, we will still try to release a Debian Etch or Lenny version, but unfortunately it will be lagged a few months. Also, we will be working on some issues which are preventing eBox from entering into the official Ubuntu repositories to comply with its policy. That means eBox will automatically comply with Debian policy too which opens the doors to be some day into the official Debian repositories too. We also love Debian here :) I hope this helps shed some light on this topic. kind regards, Javi _______________________________________________ Ebox-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.warp.es/mailman/listinfo/ebox-user
