Re: Renaming or forking familiar?

Koen Kooi wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We (mostly Mickey and me) are getting ready to pick a name for our
> merged distro through a voting process (more details on that will follow
> soon), and there's a big chance the new name won't be 'Familiar'. I was
> wondering how the 'oldtimers' and handhelds.org will handle that. Can we
> promote it as a rename, of will it be considered a fork, and someone
> (George, Jamey, Nelson, ....) will pick up Familiar?
> Choice is good and all, but I'd like to keep 'us' all together so we can
> all work together on a kick-ass, stable distro.
> It's still guesswork, there's still a chance "Familiar" gets picked.
>
>
Last night, we old timers got together on IRC to talk about this, and
then we talked with Koen. I'll recap here for everyone.

We think that the Familiar name has value, and we would like to continue
using it for a user-centered distribution targeted at handheld
computers. We would like to incorporate support for other handhelds,
such as the Zaurus, etc., but that requires at least one developer per
platform to integrate kernel support and to test releases of Familiar on
that platform. We think that quality has gone downhill a bit since
0.7.x because there has not been as much focus on fixing bugs. On the
other hand, with OE we now have a build system that will build all the
packages from source.

What we would like to do with Familiar in the next releases is focus
more on stability and usability. This means that we need to limit the
number of packages upgraded on micro releases to those that fix bugs
registered against the release. We plan to add an update feed to the
new releases for security updates and bug fixes.

For developers, there is the unstable feed. Although it is great to be
able to build the whole release from source using OE, we think we need
developers to be able to build just their own applications if they
prefer, using devel packages from the release. This is also necessary
in order to produce update packages for a release.

One of the things that came up is the need to update the ipaq cluster.
Ideally, Familiar would contain enough packages, built for Familiar or
provided by Debian, that anyone with an ipaq with sufficient storage
could use it for native development. An update Intimate distribution
would solve this problem, but it's not the only way to solve this
problem. The maintenance problem with the ipaq cluster is that right
now it is the only thing using that configuration of packages.

If there is still a desire to produce a new distribution with a
different focus on handhelds.org, we will be happy to continue to host
it in addition to Familiar.

Thanks,
Jamey
Received on Tue Jun 21 2005 - 10:24:29 EDT