Hello team A few days ago a discussion on the opensuse-optimize mailinglist was started about the future of our distro in regard to its building blocks, the packages. A suggestion was made to extend this discussion to this list and invite anyone on here to add their ideas. SUSE.de has already signaled that this would be a fantastic brainstorming opportunity for us, since once 10.0 is released there will be certainly decisions needed on how to proceed on that subject. The community build servers are not that far away (early next year) and that does force us to start thinking about things now and certainly more and more over the next months. This is our chance to define the future and effective growth of our distro. I have started a WIKI site on http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Packager Which currently contains unsorted ideas from the current discussions. I would think that we should continue to add to that via a discussion here. I can if you want transfer those ideas to the wiki page or someone else can, I prefer the latter, or just do it yourself directly to the WIKI page. After 10.0 is released we can then start to structure those ideas into a more coherent and consistent form, which then could be integrated into things to come. Remember that packages are the building blocks of your distro and the way you will get packages as a user will certainly be defined and define also by how packagers create their packages. One goes hand in hand with the other. The future and innovation of this OS is going to define how quickly we can grow effectively and in a stable manner into the future and create enough innovative force to allow our distro to prevail in the commercial reality, which needs this innovation to give us the competitive edge. In my opinion this discussion needs to start now for us to have enough time to come to a clear consensus, convince most and create the foundations for years to come. Thanks for listening and happy brainstorming ;) Regards, Andreas Girardet