On 9/3/23 15:54, Richard Brown wrote:
On 2023-09-03 02:45, Simon Lees wrote:
So I've seen enough from the granite discussions along with enough user and developer interest (which didn't have to be much) to want to work on / build a Granite++ I.E. Rather then just doing a 1:1 rebuild, having an additional repo similar to openSUSE_Backports for Leap and allowing contributors to submit whichever packages they feel they'd like on top.
I think that this will be a sustainable approach in that Granite gives us a good base OS and we will only be adding on top of it the stuff that people care enough about to contribute and to the people who do contribute it will be more useful then plane granite plus keeping a bunch of there own packages in there home repo's. At some point I should probably also talk to the package hub team, because if they are interested in a package hub concept for ALP its likely we could also share some effort.
Will it be functionally comparable with Leap, probably not will it be comparable enough to be marketed as a Leap replacement at this stage who knows. Will it be a useful standalone distro that's worth doing in my opinion yes. If it reaches the contributor and user level of something like MicroOS then i'd be willing to call it a working success.
To answer your final two questions, I still plan to go ahead with these efforts once the ALP repo's are successfully synced back into OBS at least to the point of starting to get some of the packages I care about working. As for a timeframe personally i'm not planning on doing too much until Granite is a little more fleshed out and more of the package set starts being added to ALP. Otherwise it will probably lead to a bunch of duplicated effort.
Finally I think slowroll is a fun concept and I look forward to seeing the results if people keep playing with the idea.
Thanks for sharing your plans Simon
But like you seem to accept, they may not exactly equate to a viable Leap replacement
With Granite not coming until 2025 and there being no plan for a Leap 15.7, there would be a high risk of having no option for Leap users for a year or two while your idea takes form, gets developed and then released
Well from my maths a 15.6 mid 2024 + 18 months of support lands us at the end of 2025 and while now is probably too early to work on something I'd hope that we'd be able to work on something in parallel with granite development through 2025 so that we have something viable by the end of 2025, As long as all the key components of Granite are in place I also wouldn't rule out trying to release something a little before the granite release maybe within the Beta period if it helps with time frames. This might not meet every need of every existing Leap user but it would certainly be my goal to meet the needs of as many as we reasonably can so there is atleast some choice for people who don't wish to move to full tumbleweed. Of course from these numbers we might not get the general 6 months we have for migration between current point releases but unless Granite releases in December of 2025 hopefully we can get more then a month. If toward the end of 2025 we look like we have a viable replacement but might ideally need a little more time for migration then i'd certainly consider getting the board to approach SUSE about maybe the possibility of moving from 18 months of support to maybe 21 for 15.6. But either way at this stage i'm certainly not seeing a period where there'd be a year or two of completely unsupported systems. Given how similar the planned approach is to Leap and the fact we were able to put together a prototype in a week based off just the Marble codebase the design is mostly there and really all we are waiting for is some up to date ALP sources to hit OBS it doesn't really need to be all of Granite either if we just start working with a smaller subset of packages until the core of ALP starts to land and we build more on top of it. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B