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
