Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Question about gNewSense 5 (Debian Stretch)

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Fri, 21 Apr 2017 18:30:19 +0200
schreef Paul Boddie <address@hidden>:

> I can probably dig up something either from the MoinMoin site or from
> scripts I've written to delete users who register to try and spam but
> never manage to perform edits.

Excellent.

> I think Moin is a good-enough solution for the gNewSense site. Going
> off and making another CMS or trying to shoehorn WordPress, Plone or
> Drupal into this role is a colossal distraction that probably won't
> yield the hoped-for benefits, anyway.

Seconded.

> Is no-one getting any financial support for working on gNewSense,
> then? Is it yet another case of "glory" supposedly being sufficient
> reward for everybody's time and the impact on their health and
> quality of life?

I think I'm one of many who would like to get paid to work on free
software, but struggle to find a working business model. I'm sure some
people would like to make a donation for gNewSense, but that's unlikely
to add up to a steady income. So quitting the day job is not an option
and then donation wouldn't buy time. That's why I don't accept
donations at all.

> For me, I'd just appreciate a simple overview of how Debian's output
> is transformed into gNewSense. It seems to me that everyone who knows
> how a distribution is made is so embedded in the process that they
> never really care about communicating how it is done. As far as I
> remember, the wiki had some descriptions, but they were out-of-date
> and described the previous Ubuntu- based approach.

The general idea is this:

1) Copy Debian's package repository.
2) Identify the packages that don't align with the Free Software
Distribution Guidelines or that contain Debian specific branding.
3) For each of those packages:
3a) Unpack the source
3b) Modify the code
3c) Update version info, changelog and other package metadata
3d) Repackage source and build binaries
4) Replace those packages in the package repository
5) Build installer images

Builder is a tool that knows about repo locations, branding info,
packages to be modified, build instructions etc.