> Jaromil wrote:

> >Its early to say, but this thread is just prospecting. I believe that
> >on a longer term we can hardly do worse tha Debian when untangling
> >dependencies that right now constantly drag in desktop oriented
> >stuff, like avahi and other similar nonsense that we almost got used
> >to swallow all these years.
> >
> >on the mid - long term it won't be just systemd to make the
> >difference between Devuan and Debian.

On Sat, 08 Aug 2015, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> But now we get into the question of can Devuan really attract a full
> set of package maintainers?

it depends what you mean by "full". To us it certainly doesn't means the
size of Debian, but a core system which can be reliably used as a base
by both upstream and downstream: developers, devops, sysadmins and
distributions who compile the key production packages from source and/or
package themselves, as yourself pointed out in this thread.

what I call the hardest part we have already demonstrated we're able to
do: putting together a continuous integration infrastructure for the
core system, using software we wrote, hence we can scale organically and
we can further develop ad-hoc to overcome initial difficulties (see for
instance the caching approach taken with Amprolla, or our fixes to
jenkins-debian-glue, or the upcoming fixes to qemu-arm builds).

IF what we do turns out to be useful for all those professionals
preferring GNU/Linux to *BSD (and realistically, the latter is today the
best pro- alternative to the amateurial mess Linux is becoming) then
there won't be need for an horde of mediocre package maintainers, but a
pack of few good ones.

There is much more to be said, for instance the emergence of new
packaging systems which will be surclassing old ones in 2-3 years
maximum, for instance see Guix and NixOS with the smart adoption of a
declarative language for the task.

I'll also refrain to observe the sort of labour relationship Debian is
instaurating with its volunteers, the majority being students and people
who abandon once they got a job. I'll just say we are aiming at a
different approach here and it shall be focused on quality, not
quantity.

ciao

--
Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Dyne.org Think (& Do) Tank
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