Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Stepping down

[Sam Geeraerts]

On 24/07/19 15:59, Paul Boddie wrote:
> Thank you for all your work on gNewSense, and please do not feel that you 
> have 
> disappointed anyone! Those of us who try and make things to share with others 
> can often experience a sense of obligation to continue to deliver those 
> things, but nobody should be in a position to demand anything from you or 
> even 
> expect anything from you.

Thanks for your kind words. I feel the same when I see other people
leaving the project to which they contributed passionately for a length
of time. It's another thing, though, when you're in that position
yourself. I did feel an obligation, to myself and others, to keep going.
And I don't mean that in a sense that it was a burden or that anyone was
pressuring me. It just felt like the right thing to do.

> I know that there was some work on the tooling a while back, and I do wonder 
> what might be needed to bring the distribution back up to date. If some of us 
> could be led through that process, even if deficiencies are known to exist 
> with it, maybe it would allow things to continue.

One of the reasons for stepping down is that I feel like the tooling is
not up to the task of maintaining the distro efficiently and I didn't
have the time to both maintain the distro and improve the tooling.
There's a good chance that better tooling would require significant
changes to the repository, which would mean either bothering users or
even more work to make it transparent.

If anyone is serious about continuing, I am of course willing to lead
them through the process. But I'm also tempted to say that it might be
worth starting with a clean slate and first have a good look at other
Debian derivatives and maybe first invest some time in getting to know
Debian's Derivative working group [1] and even help to streamline that
some more. I think there's still too much reinventing the wheel going
on, and admit that I was guilty of that myself.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives