Hello community, this mail is the result of years of continuous development in my (corporate and private) environment as engineer favoring SUSE, and I kindly invite anyone to send thoughts, comments and ideas regarding this mail. I see this topic "as in progress" and if there aren't any ultimately bad reasons why not to do so, I will continue and support this as long as I can. - Disclaimer: This is all IMHO ;) - My idea is to build a SLES binary-compatible distribution completely supported by the community (and optionally supported by companies which are willing to do so) - most of you will probably see lots of similarities with CentOS in this way - And in fact: This is exactly what I intend it to be. Why? - SLES is one of two key players in the major distribution league. RH has CentOS, and whereever you see "respins" like for appliances, they use CentOS (or maybe some debian/ubuntu/knoppix-stuff) - no SUSE. Examples: Trixbox, ESVA, and _lots_ of projects in which I've been involved in development however its not officially communicated as CentOS. - SUSE is the best Distro in terms of packaging and distribution technology (OBS), has a huge community-base and uses technology which IMHO is unmatched for various reasons such as KIWI (thx to Marcus Schaefer ;)). - openSUSE is a "moving target" in terms of its faster release cycle and it in fact is a problem that older releases disappear from the mirrors pretty soon. (I would not change anything here) - But: This doesn't really allow you a "LTS"-like behaviour if things change so fast. - SUSE has a great community of highly motivated and skilled guys (and gals) ;) - lots of developments in openSUSE find their way right into SLES, approved and tested by SUSE engineers. What I can and will provide: - I'm just building up a rack to provide various build nodes. Target arch's include: x86, x86_64, sparc64, ia64, ppc64. Most of the parts are already available, but since I'm currently moving and I need to get a stable permanent internet connection this could take up to 2 months. So this enables us right from scratch to set up a parallel OBS for the intial build setup. Official OBS could always be used as soon as we have reached a "staging" level where we can provide a base set of packages. - I will provide anyone with an account and try to build a full "infrastructure" which then should also should get the transition to "community-controlled" behaviour. For all (eventually) upcoming questions: - Yes, I do know about openSUSE Evergreen, but it lacks some points I've mentioned above like "Enterprise Features", 1-on-1-("binary")compatibility with SLES and the great quality work by SUSE to get SLES certified by OEM's etc. - and no one really points its OBS tree to build against Evergreen, it points it to major channels like SLES11, SLES11SP1, oS11.4, etc. - No, I do not want to work "against" SUSE or anything like that. The complete opposite is the case: Without SUSE this would not work well. In fact I really think SUSE also can profit from a community base around the SLES packages. Take a look at CentOS - Does it really hurt RHEL? I don't think so, at least not to a major extent. Lets get the facts straight: If you are in a corporate environment you _will_ (or at least you _should_) buy a SLES. Reasons: Support, Updates, Faster upstream process, tracking, direct contact, etc. But: If you want to build a steady home system which you do not want to upgrade less than every year in a major way or you might want to build a distro fork for special purpose (like for system integrators, etc.) you (probably) wouldn't want to go with the fully blown SLES. - Yes, I see this as lots of work. Please let me know if you are willing to help. ;) Can't await reading your comments. Cheers, - mike -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org