I'll interject with some miscellaneous thoughts on terminology: - *the* GNU system, as such, exists without any specific action necessary. The GNU system is, simply put, a collection of free software that can be used together to give rise to a completely free Unixoid operating system. That is, the system as a whole arises as an emergent property of all of those software packages interacting with each other. The software need not be exclusively distributed by GNU and plenty of important pieces are not. Thus, RMS's original goal, I think, has long been satisfied, even if some things have not gone as originally planned (eg the kernel situation).
- distributions of the GNU system are specific efforts to, well, distribute the GNU system as defined by a chosen set of components. The specific components may vary from distro to distro, but the system that arises from their combination is still GNU. Some, lamentably, include some very non-GNU components, but despite those warts and festering lesions, are still essentially GNU systems. - I don't know if it makes much sense, then, to talk about an "official" GNU distribution. We would essentially be saying "these are the components that we deem to be strictly necessary to produce the GNU system". But we know it isn't true: many of those components have perfectly valid free software alternatives; swapping those components for alternatives would still produce a free GNU operating system. e.g. swapping openssh for lsh would still result in a free GNU system. I would argue that rather than talking about producing The Official GNU System, we should be talking about producing a *reference* distribution of the GNU system. The Guix guys are effectively doing that in my opinion and I think it's great. Now, instead of us saying "these are the strictly necessary components", we're saying "here is, to us, an excellent way to put together the GNU system" with an extra advantage of being able to highlight some GNU Project packages that don't normally get included in the other distros (again like lsh vs openssh). How does that sound? Am I on my own in thinking this way? -brandon -- Brandon Invergo http://brandon.invergo.net
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