Indy roadmap

[Jean Francois Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

		What can be done?

It could seem that Indy is a crazy idea since with only three people.
However if first release gets some interest and two or three people
more then second release will have more man power and be better so it
gets still more pople.  And that is how if things go well you can get
a nice snowball effect.


	  Roadmap

First of all there is the question of what distribution to pick as
base.  It must be GPL, well known (so user can get books about it and
in case he uses commercial software it will install and run flawlessly),
and easily available no matter where you are

This lets basically two candidates: RedHat and Mandrake.  The problem
with RedHat is that it basically sucks as desktop and home computers,
plus its installer is no longer really state of the art.  But it is
still the reference ie software vendors (even vendors of free
software) port and test against RedHat first and with other
distributions getting -eventually- ports later.  And small distribs
don't get ports at all so unless they are closely compatible with one
of the main disytribs their users will have to struggle with files who
are not in the same place or libaries who are not at same version.


Mandrake has a wonderful installation and a very good sowftare
selection.  But many software vendors still don't take it seriously
and thus they get no ports (ie software will run but could require
tweaking and it will not be supported by vendor).  Also at times they
do things I consider dangerous or having a negative effect.

For those reasons I think RedHat is the best (or less bad) base
available.  I also think it is important Indy should not break Redhat
compatibility or at least not in anything who can affect other
software like libraries, file placement or menuing system.


First step: First step will be to update that software I had prepared
before Indy's hibernation and insert into RedHat 7.1

Second step: Redhat installer has become primitive so bolt Mandrake
installer on top of Indy will give it a definite plus.

Third step: At this time it will be time for a public release.  While
Indy will still be inferior to Mandrake it could interest some people.
When we will know how amny of them it will be time to define new roadmap.


One of Indy problems has ever been I was never happy with what it had and
ever wanted just another thing in the distrib.  Then next RedHat was
published and delayed Indy still more.  This time it should have
monthly or bi-monthly "checkpoints": releases with a small delta
respective to previous one, same installer but additional or
modernized software.