On Tue, 20 Dec 2016, Steve Litt wrote:

> The concepts discussed are deep, far reaching, and branch off a long
> way from software. I have a feeling that reading this document
> carefully would teach me a lot more than software. This is a
> manifesto.

I used to be very much against manifestos all my life, my motto being
"Death to Manifestos, viva Howto's". Because manifestos are made to
define a cultural practice and/or identity, they are often arrogant in
defining a new constituency (or new group etc.). For instance I never
like the "Hacker's manifesto" book by McKenzie Wark, which besides
being written by someone completely foreign to the hacker movement,
mostly puts forward some sort of abstract interpretation (or wishful
thinking) on how things are in hacker culture, ending up in a marxoid
distortion of what has been academically defined "Californian
Ideology" and ultimately defeated by history during the times we are
living in.

Yet I don't feel so bad about this booklet :^) I think is a good start
and can be a useful tool to explain the nature of Devuan in certain
circles, but not all of them. It underlines the fact Devuan is born
from a huge governance problem in Debian, rather than pure hate for
systemd. But it also adopts a "proprietary language" as you say, an
idiolect, which must be better explained to be used.

Clearly during the booksprint process there were misunderstandings
that are now weighting on the final result. Now we need to make sure
everyone is back on the same page and put in place a collective
methodology that goes beyond the push forward that Hellekin has
contributed. However the fundations are in place and well done. Lets
take some time to contribute to its content, make it simpler and also
include more factual information on the usage and customisation of
Devuan.

The commonly understood goal for this booklet is to reach a stage
where it is useful for Devuan, but also for derivatives to fork it in
one direction or another. Therefore I'm looking forward to comments
from those of us maintaining Devuan derivative distributions, to point
out directions of improvement. One of these derivatives is what we'll
start working on from january onwards at Dyne.org and that has a
budget to cover part of the costs of this booklet. But as it is now,
only half of the booklet can really be useful for it, since there
needs to be more practical information on installation etc.

So all in all it still needs a lot more work, which is contemplated by
the booklet itself, as a sort of campfire starter, while it represents
a milestone that goes nicely with our upcoming stable release - and of
course is already a collector's item. Disclosure: I do collect books
and I may be exaggerating this now, yet this booklet, hopefully soon
signed by contributors, will go side by side with my copy of Mount
Analogue by Rene Daumal printed in 1961 by City Lights SF, another
very special book which may help all those involved so far to
understand the process in which we are in.
Let this campfire become one of our Alpine Refuges.

ciao