Re: The Kernel (fwd)

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On Sat, 24 Jan 1998, Rick Jones wrote:

> You keep saying that and I keep wondering why.  Explain what you mean by
> that.  Wouldn't that be no different than advertising SEUL's release on
> the web page with a link that say's "download SEUL 0.1" that just points
> to Debian's ftp site?

Actually with 0.1 we COULD do that except I expect changes to start coming
pretty fast after the baseline release.  I want to have out own archive so
that you can point dselect's ftp method to seul/stable seul/upgrades etc.

Secondly, it is to be a cooperative effort with Debian. Before we make
changes to something, we first need to know if there is a REASON why
something was done a certain way rather than discovering (all over again)
that if you change X it breaks Y.  There might have been some tradeoffs
that Debian makes that we might not want to.  Our priorities are
different.  

Our choice is to sit around bickering forever on a mailing list about a
perfect distribution and never releasing anything because it is constantly
changing OR select a working baseline, adopt it, and start making
incremental releases as we change it part-by-part. I opt for the second
route because the most beautiful program in the world is absolutely
useless if it is not being used.  An imperfect but useful package is
better than a perfect theory.  

So we put out Debian as SEUL 0.1, make some changes to make it better,
incorporate them and call it 0.2, feed the changes and the reasoning for
them back into Debian.  Maybe Debian adopts them, maybe they feed US back
some improvements on our improvements, maybe they point out that we just
potentially broke something that we did not know about.

In any case, out 0.2 release SHOULD be better for the end user than 0.1.
And we increment it from there.  Think of Debian 2.0 as a block of marble
and we are going to sculpt into SEUL.

> SEUL should be using Debian as a very good reference/resource, not
> copying it.

The first release of SEUL will be a SEUL-ized version of Debian 2.0 unless
you can get a SEUL 0.1 full release done within a couple of weeks. Again,
this is so we can have a baseline, get the UI people working on the UI
protion, get the kernel people working on the kernel portion, etc.  We are
going to take a car and rebuild it, we do not, in my opinion, have the
resources to design and build a car from scratch.  

I do not know about you but I have a fill time job.  I do not need another
non-paying full time job.  Same with many of the rest of us.  We do not
have the time to develop a release from scratch.  Do know how many YEARS
it took debian to release 1.0?  And that is with a LOT of people working
on it.


George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.