Debian Pure Blends [LWN.net]

From:		Andreas Tille <tillea-AT-rki.de>
To:		debian-devel-announce-AT-lists.debian.org
Subject:		Announcement: Debian Pure Blends news
Date:		Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:26:46 +0100 (CET)
Message-ID:		<alpine.DEB.2.00.0811100947210.13878@wr-linux02>
Archive-link:		Article, Thread

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Hello,

for those who might wander what the term Debian Pure Blends means: the
Custom Debian Distributions now are called Debian Pure Blends - see below
for further information.

Here comes an update what was done since the beginning of this year
which might be interesting for several projects.

Web-Tools
- ---------

I'm proud to announce a new QA tool for all CDD^W Blends: Overview about
all bugs about Dependencies of our metapackages.  For the impatient here
is a list of these pages:

  Debian Edu:     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/edu/bugs
  Debian GIS:     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/gis/bugs
  Debian Jr:      http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/junior/bugs
  Debian Med:     http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/bugs
  Debian Science: http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/bugs

You can read more about the estimation of tasks status of the bugs at
the Blends/BugPages wiki page[1].


Not that new are the so called tasks pages which are listing the packages
in focus of a Blend as well as those projects which are not yet packaged
but might be intersting - so called "prospective packages".  Here are
links to the relevant tasks pages:

  Debian Edu:     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/edu/tasks
  Debian GIS:     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/gis/tasks
  Debian Jr:      http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/junior/tasks
  Debian Med:     http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks
  Debian Science: http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks


Both overviews are updated twice a day in a cron job.  The tasks pages
are interesting for users and developers and thus we tried to translate
as much as possible by using the work of the DDTP project (we also
provide links where translations might be needed).


You can expect more tools which deal with sets of packages for
a certain working field in the not so far future.


Renaming Custom Debian Distributions to Debian Pure Blend
- ---------------------------------------------------------

We realised that the old name Custom Debian Distributions just sended
the wrong message to outsiders: The conclusion that CDDs are something
else than Debian was to "obvious" if people did not read the relevant
documentation.  So we finally found a raw consensus for a new name:

         Debian Pure Blends

In the code inside Debian we use 'blend' for factorised code that
concerns a single Blend (given as an option or something like that
and 'blends' if it is working for all Blends in one context.  The
Debian and Pure is evidend inside Debian internal code like packages
blends-dev (formerly cdd-dev) or blends-common (formerly cdd-common)
etc.  Configuration for blends will go into /etc/blends (formerly
/etc/cdd.

You can find more information on the according Wiki page[2] or the
detailed paper about Debian Pure Blends[3].

Slides of a talk (in German) I have hold about Debian Pure Blends
at Linux-Info-Tag (Dresden) is available as well[4].

Kind regards

         Andreas.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Blends/BugsPages
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends
[3] http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/blends
[4] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200811_dresden_blends/

- -- 
http://fam-tille.de
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(Log in to post comments)

Debian Pure Blends

Posted Nov 10, 2008 18:57 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

There was a lengthy discussion in the name. "remix" was suggested, as well as "spin" , a-la Fedora.

One quality that the name "pure blend" that most other suggestions lacked is that you can easily relate to a blend that is not "pure", that is: (in *this* context) is not fully contained in the Debian Stable distribution.

Historically Debian Pure Blends

Debian Pure Blens is technically a rename if an earlier Debian subproject, the poorly named "Custom Debian Distribution" (cdd, debian-custom). As you can see, the debian-custom list was generated as Apr-2004.

Ubuntu is not such a distribution (that attempts to be part of Debian Stable or at least be compatible to it). Therefore it is simply out of the scope of this.

Debian Pure Blends

Posted Nov 10, 2008 19:21 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Fedora does differentiate between "pure" derivatives and otherwise. There are two different terms used within Fedora: Spins and Remixes for this purpose. Refer to the trademark guidelines for details

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/TrademarkGuidelines

Spins and Remixes as concepts have been introduced by Fedora during the Fedora 7 days however the trademark guidelines adopting the terminology is relatively recent.

Debian Pure Blends

Posted Nov 11, 2008 1:11 UTC (Tue) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

Thanks for that tidbit of useless information. What was your point?

Selective comparison?

Posted Nov 11, 2008 6:03 UTC (Tue) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link]

The white-paper is around 20,000 words long and fairly encompassing of the topic in hand.

A number of distributions are mentioned; Red Hat (7), Suse/Novell (6), Mandrake (5), derivatives Knoppix, Xandros, Linspire and others—including Guadalinex and 64 Studio (Ubuntu second-level derivatives).

Those all-encompassing topics include "Commercial forks", "Non-commerical forks" and "Differences from other distributions". Twenty-thousand words later and I realised that it felt as though there were some unnatural tiny gaps.

Did you find the references to felt hats, African philosophies, spins or remixes ...that I missed?

Bad data ?

Posted Nov 11, 2008 10:14 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Both Guadalinex and 64 Studio are based on Debian, not Ubuntu second-level derivatives.

see http://www.64studio.com/faq_user,
http://www.guadalinex.org/que-es-guadalinex.

Bad data ?

Posted Nov 11, 2008 17:10 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Hell ya.

64Studio kicks-ass and one of the MAJOR plus points for me is that they remain 100% compatible with Debian. This means that while 64Studio is a very small professional team they are able to constantly release a supportable product with a relatively high amount of good Q/A.

In other words they don't half-ass it like Ubuntu does and is able to avoid 'NIH' pitfalls and 'Reinventing the Wheel' traps that happens with things like Xandros, Ubuntu, and even Ubuntu studio. (Not that I think that Ubuntu folks are morons. They are very smart and do a good job, but IMO they have shot themselves in the foot with this one)

All the Debian A/V stuff benefits heavily from the old Demudi project, because that project remained compatible with Debian. It's packages that it created was easily absorbed back into Debian and thus Debian users and 64Studio were able to benefit from that heavily.

Oh, and Fedora/Redhat folks did not benefit in the same way from the Redmudi project...

------------------------

The ultimate lesson in all of this is that when people learn to get over themselves and base everything on the same core OS then you end up with a much better product in the long run.

Who are thee and they?

Posted Nov 11, 2008 18:56 UTC (Tue) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link]

By "They", are you referring the group of ~20 Debian Developers employed by Mr. Shuttleworth; or some other group of "They"?

Who are thee and they?

Posted Nov 11, 2008 19:40 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ya. When I said:

> They are very smart and do a good job, but IMO they have shot themselves in the foot with this one

I meant the folks that work for Canonical.

Parentage

Posted Nov 11, 2008 19:27 UTC (Tue) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link]

I apologise for having placed 64 Studio in the wrong category.

IIRC, Guadalinex switched to deriving via Ubuntu at the end of 2004^[1] (having formerly used Progeny's "Componentized Linux").

Parentage

Posted Nov 11, 2008 19:57 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well here with
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww....

(Since my spanish is very very very bad)

They talk about the need to be very close to Debian and avoiding trying to work around Debian's maintenance/packaging policies.

I don't know, it could just be a very old webpage.

But if they did switch back to Debian from Ubuntu they would not be the first ones. Xandros/Freespire did that.. they migrated from Debian to Ubuntu due to Debian's dismal ability to actually getting a release, er, released. But they've switched back, presumably by the difficulty poised in trying to make Ubuntu stable and work for their purposes.

Now if Debian actually could release software on time there would of never been need for Ubuntu and all of this would be a non-issue. I understand why Ubuntu decided to break free from backward compatibility.

Parentage

Posted Nov 11, 2008 20:08 UTC (Tue) by ris (editor, #5) [Link]

That is an old page, from around 2003. My spanish is not great either, but I can't find anything on their site to indicate that Guadalinex has changed from Ubuntu, which formed the base of the 2005 release and subsequent releases.

Guadalinex v5 was released today, BTW.

Selective comparison?

Posted Nov 11, 2008 10:40 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

The name "Mandrake" should give you a hint that this is mostly an update of a document that was written when Mandriva was still called Mandrake.

Ubuntu, by the terminology of that white-paper chose to become a completely separate fork, and hence has to replicate much of Debian's infrastructure. Ubuntu's creators had their reasons for doing so, and this is perfectly legitimate.

However, this white-paper is about Debian-based distributions that do not want to pay this high price. It is about providing them tools to maintain their own subsets of Debian in a productive as possible way.

Debian Pure Blends

Posted Nov 11, 2008 8:52 UTC (Tue) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

It's not clear to me, what you are trying to say. Do you think, that Ubuntu, Canonical or Remix should have been mentioned in this context? If so, why?