Re: Project organisation

Hi all!

George France wrote:
> I am becoming much more actively involved, along with several others from the
> 0.7.x days . The move of the servers and administration stuff has taken a
> bit more time than I would have liked. Here is the brief "draft" version.

That's good news - from what i remember these days were when Familiar was driven
by CRL. Did you guys manage to replace HP by some other sponsor?

> Familiar is returning to its original user-oriented focus. Familiar is
> designed to be a very flexible distribution, offering users a choices of many
> applications. ...

Isn't this what quite some people are working on all the time?

> Familiar will be derived from Debian (maybe ubuntu) ARM, on which GPE, Maemo,
> and Opie will be layered. Familiar application developers will be able to
> use scratchbox for cross compilation. One of the features of Familiar
> distribution is the package upload facility, enabling new developers to
> contribute to the project very quickly.

This is interesting... there were quite some rumors about his lately. That
brings us back to my original question: How are these things decided?

Apart from these organizational issues - there are similar projects like
Emdebian and EmbeddedUbuntu already and Familiar as it is at the moment works in
a different way. If someone wants to go into this direction why not work with
these existing projects and leave Familiar as it is?

With the move to its current structure Familiar gained very much:
- A concept of target devices, before this it was a pain to add support for new
devices and maintin this.
- A huge knowlege base about how to build optimized packages.
- Many many contributors keeping packages much more up to date.
- Independence from the architecture of the target platform.

> The next Familiar release is 0.9, which will support the N770 as well as other
> handhelds.

Supporting the 770 is a good idea. In fact current Familiar works pretty good on
it. What we currently lack is support for some hardware controls on the device
and dyntick aware software.

> As part of Familiar operation, we will reinstate the handhelds.org steering
> committee weekly/biweekly conference calls.

That might have been a good idea while Familiar was driven by CRL, but now that
Familiar is developed by community members for years this would be a very
inappropriate way to manage this project.

Greetings

Florian

-- 
The dream of yesterday                  Florian Boor
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and the reality of tomorrow.            Fax: +49 271-771091-19
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