On 16.03.2017 12:10, Didier Kryn wrote:

>     Many free software developper teams proved already they are mostly
> working for themselves - eg Gnome, KDE, Firefox. When people develop
> software for free, they put a lot of their ego in it, and this goes
> against the ability to recognize ones own mistakes or bad decisions; I
> think this is the weak point of free software.

Well, that also applies to us, also any distro, and I dont see a major
problem here.

We just need some way to reduce the amount of duplicate work.

Several years ago, I started a project called 'oss-qm' which aimed to
collect maintenance branches for lots of packages, which solve the
common problems in a generic way (instead of all the dist specific
patches), so distros can base their branches on that. The problem then
wasn't systemd (which handn't been invented yet), but poor upstream QM.

Unfortunately, nobody jumped up and it was way too much for me alone.

Maybe Devuan could be a good place for giving it a fresh start.
We'd also collect all the depotterizing patches (along w/ others)
there and regularily post our queues to the upstreams.

I'm pretty agnostic on how the process actually works, just a small
set of requirements:

* always the full trees in a git repo
* dist-specific branches should be named w/ <distname>/ prefix
and contain all build files, w/o additional patching
(IOW: patches already applied instead of extra files)
* for each supported version there should be separate maint branch,
where the dists can base theirs on
* some (per package) central repo where all branches from around the
world are collected.

Anybody here interested in that ?

>     They just don't care, as long as developpers comply with their
> requirements. Even some developpers are only concerned with the amount
> of work implied for them by the init system, and prefer systemd just
> because of that - good example in the thread pointed by
> dotcommon@???:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2017-03/msg00017.html.

application developers should't ever provide any dist specific stuff
like init scripts (except examples). instead should tell what's
necessary for running their stuff.

>     Look, today Devuan lives with using mostly Debian packages, a small
> fraction of which being de-poetterized. 

That's already a good thing, and really should be continued. But the
corresponding patches should also go to the upstreams.

> Debian will continue living by mirroring Devuan and poetterizing some
> of the packages; they'll not give up.

That would be quite a fun.


--mtx