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

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Sat, 22 Apr 2017 21:05:11 +0200
schreef Paul Boddie <address@hidden>:

> I just wondered about this because for some organisations it is
> important to have libre GNU/Linux distributions available, and yet
> the number of such distributions seems to have fluctuated over the
> years, and their continued availability has been uncertain. It
> probably isn't in anyone's best interests for things to continue like
> this. While enthusiastic volunteers can always be persuaded to spend
> their own time on it (for the "glory"), it just frustrates and
> confuses people if those volunteers burn out, give up, and so on. And
> I doubt that the FSF having to constantly evaluate new distributions
> is a great use of their (volunteers') time.

I guess they now have some influence on it, since they employ one of
the libre distro maintainers (although in another role). Other than
that, there are no easy answers.

> I saw once again that Devuan has been trying to make derivative
> distribution building easier:
> 
> https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=551
> https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=549

The live cd docs will come in handy. Their packaging is similar to what
we did for Ucclia. But it doesn't explain how upstream updates are
processed. That was a manual process for Ucclia and thus a bottleneck.
It also doesn't explain what to do when the upstream package is not in
git. I suspect that would also need to be solved manually.

The nice thing about Builder is that it requires little manual
intervention once it's set up correctly.