On 11 March 2017 at 14:58, Klaas Freitag
Hi,
I am happy to see that there is some interest in the idea :)
Am 08.03.2017 um 13:05 schrieb Richard Brown:
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
I am not clear what you mean here. What is it that makes a 'derivate'?
I am not fond of seeing many separate openSUSE distributions. We have Leap and Tumbleweed with a comparable level of quality, and I fear having more distribution offerings with the name 'openSUSE' gives the project a negative reputation - at best one that has a confusing message about what it offers, at worst, a reputation for bad quality when the 'derivatives' do not meet the same level of quality of the official 'mainline' openSUSE distributions. That said, I do understand the appeal of a 'derivative' that is specifically focused on more narrow use cases - see openSUSE JeOS for one such example which I think is done right. In this case, and in the way I'd prefer for all cases, all of the packages are in the main Leap/Tumbleweed distributions, have all been quality checked through the usual processes to get them there, and therefore the only responsibility for JeOS is to polish, package and rebadge the distribution for that specific usecase. This is a lot easier to do, especially in the long term, precisely because a lot of the heavy-lifting of the integration is taken care of as part of the traditional Leap/Tumbleweed processes. Other derivatives, that have dozens, or hundreds, of additional, untested, unintegrated packages in their spin, give me cause for concern, especially when they do not implement processes and standards approaching the mainline Leap/Tumbleweed distributions, but still wish to use the openSUSE name. They also need a consistent and often increasing commitment to keep them running, as that large overlayed codebase will need continued rebasing as Leap and Tumbleweed move on. I see any 'derivative' that distributes a significant number of packages that are not in the main distribution at significant risk of failure over the mid to long term.
The current Invis server builds based on openSUSE Leap and has currently 29 specific packages on top, as one can find in https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis:stable
These are packages are mostly specific to Invis, such as the setup and special applications which are not in the interest of a generic distribution (I suspect). Most dependency packages are already in the underlying distros aka Factory I guess.
I think that this sounds like a proper way of doing it, or not?
invis is a mostly good example of a derivative done right. 29 packages is certainly not bad. They invis team have proven themselves more than capable of maintaining that level of deviation for many years now. But I do not think it's ideal - I would like to see if the SMB team could look into getting that down to as close as 0. It sounds like Stefan is on the same page. This is all about integration and encouraging good proven practices.
Another aspect that should be discussed is that the Invis server based on openSUSE currently has it's own branding and it's own setup- and adminstration tool. I don't think that is a problem, do others?
I don't think it's a problem. But on the flipside, I'd love it if 'mainline openSUSE' was as good as invis for SMB out of the box ;)
Apart from these technical things, I believe that a huge block of work will be to do documentation that is neccessary, but even more to do marketing around this initiative. The nicest project does not help if nobody knows about it. And the group of pot. users is very hard to reach.
+1 Agreed
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
Stefan and me will meet on Chemnitzer Linuxtage tomorrow, maybe somebody else is around? But indeed the oSC 2017 would be a great opportunity to do the first 'official' meeting and maybe kickoff?
Sadly I'm not at CLT, but I will be at oSC and most certainly want to help this initiative in whatever ways I can. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org