So,
Roelof's recent cry for help re. porting Cinnamon strikes me as yet
another data point in the mounting evidence pointing to the fact that we
clearly do need to come together -- sooner rather than later -- in the
name of focusing our efforts on assembling an easier to maintain base
system (the so-far-mostly-mythical FL3).
I personally suspect that, in the course of doing so, we would do well
to take a long, hard look at what we are and come to a sensible,
sustainable decision about what we want to be, where we want to go,
where we want to provide value and where we simply want to be e.g. a
co-operative and pragmatic derivative of another distribution.
As far as target audience goes, I could see us catering to someone who
wants a reasonably sane base from which to build custom re-spins which
again take advantage of the capabilities that Conary offers in terms of
software life-cycle management -- especially now that Conary is
being/has been re-licensed under a business-friendly, permissive
license. I also don't see us competing with neither Ubuntu nor Fedora
and their ilk and I think we would do well to flat out admit that we
don't have the resources to keep chasing that particular pipe dream.
In my view, what we need to focus on is the niche where the "intelligent
developer" roams, the developer who needs to manage many machines with
few resources and is thus essentially forced to work smarter than what
is possible with the tools offered by existing distributions. In that
niche, Conary is a strong selling point, as is a high degree of
similarity to a well known and widely used distribution such as fedora.
Michael recently made some edits to the Foresight Linux Development page
on the wiki[1], which are IMHO very much in step with the reality of
what FL is and has been for the past couple of years. Prior to Michael's
edit, the wording in the Goals section on that page was something I
originally adapted from what is probably best described as "grand
visions from the past". And my wording was a *very* conservative version
of that grand vision.
So, in summary, scaling back our ambitions and aggressively honing our
focus on our core mission might just be what the doctor ordered for FL
to thrive in its niche-within-a-niche going forward.
Or in the timeless words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When
There Is Nothing Left to Take Away"
-Rune
[1]:
http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/wiki/display/DEV/Foresight+Linux+Development
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