>> There is also PcLinuxOS even if rpm based but they have the full stack
>> systemd free and could be a source of code for devuan as they already
>> solved somehow most of the problems. Systemd free distros should
>> pool their efforts to avoid duplication and to gain critical mass.
>
> I'd like to put that onto a broader level: IMHO most of the work to do
> for distros is about QM (testing, patching, bugfixing) - we should try
> to consolidate that work, independent of individual distros and their
> technology.
>
> For decades, whenever I package something for some distro, I try to
> do most of the work in a distro agnostic way. (used to have my own
> project, called "oss-qm", which collects patches ontop of upstream
> releases to make up QM'ed branches - unfortunately no distro really
> showed any interest in that).
>
> In essenence, I'm proposing fixing up packages (and individual releases)
> up to a point where the actual distro-packaging is pretty much trivial.
> For *most* SW out there we could even invent some universal packaging
> metadata format, that could be automatically transformed into dist-
> specific build files. Of course, that only works just *mostly*, since
> there're still many exceptions. Dh (and its various helpers) is already
> a great step into that direction, but we could go some steps further
> and make it useful for completely unrelated distros and even more tricky
> cases like crosscompiling and tiny embedded scenarios.


Standardize the package format of the released versions of each free software project would be a total and desirable revolution. The burden of offering the available software would shift to software developers rather than distributions. However, unfortunately I see little viability to prosper in the current real world. Your "oss-qm" (it would be good to indicate the URL of the project) has not been the only initiative to create a standard of released software package for the software developers that allows to surpasses the diversity of packages formats. Even distros like Gentoo that don't compile but simply offer recipes that automate the download and compilation (which is a simplified version of the packaging task for distros that offer binaries, source-only distros only need to note in each recipe the download URL and build commands) have a hard time trying to achieve the role of distros: achieve that the set of software that constitutes the operating system run error-free on the computers of its users. A big problem is that many free software developers hardly take the time to publicly offer the code of their software organized according to their personal way of organizing the code without testing in the complex diversity of the universe beyond their computer (they know that their software runs fine in their operating system and development environment that is distro X version Y with versions of the dependencies A.B.C, D.E.F., G.H.I.), leaving the distros the role of compiling and packaging the software and dealing with what errors arise in architectures and combinations of versions of dependencies that are different from the software developer's computers.

As a note of the difficulty of standardizing the content of the packages of released versions by the developers, even something that should be as simple as clearly indicating in a file the licenses of all the software contained in the package, is something that is usually done wrong.

Best regards.