A few months ago, I asked a set of questions on development mailing lists of a few GNU/Linux distributions. This resulted in very interesting discussions. As promised back then, all the answers from all distros I contacted can be read on the web or as an mbox file.

Also, Freedesktop.org kindly agreed to host a mailing list to ease discussions between distributions, and act as a central point of contact. You can subscribe, and post to distributions at lists dot freedesktop dot org.

This mailing list is for people involved (or interested) in the development of distributions. Questions that are on-topic are both technical and social/organizational issues, like:

• How do you achieve graphical boot in your distro? Do you use some kind of dependancy-based or events-based boot?
• How do you package both ruby 1.8, ruby 1.9 and jruby, or handle KDE vs KDE4?
• Do you use a system that gives a limited set of rights to new contributors?

Off-topic stuff obviously include trolling about which distribution is the best one, or user support.

Don’t hesitate to forward this announcement to all interested parties. Let’s make this mailing list something useful together!

Also, I really apologize for procastinating announcing this list for sooo long. I’m really good at procastinating interesting stuff, it seems.

Scientific papers always have a “related works” section, where the authors describe how the work they are presenting compares with what others did. In the Free Software world, this is nearly non-existent: in a way, it seems that many of us are thinking of their projects as competing products, fighting for market share. On a project web page, I would love to read something like:

This project is particularly well suited if you want XX. But if YY is more important to you, you might want to have a look at ZZ.

Or simply links to similar projects for other environments, etc. All in all, I think that the goal is to improve the global satisfaction. Not to win a few users, who won’t be totally happy, because the project doesn’t really suit their needs.

While some projects cooperate and share ideas, like I think desktop environments do inside freedesktop.org, most just ignore each other. I am both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer, and I’m sometimes amazed that Ubuntu discusses technical choices that were discussed (and solved) a few weeks earlier in Debian. And it’s even worse with the other big distros out there.

Couldn’t we try to improve this ? We could just create a mailing list, where developers from various distributions could present the way they do things. This would allow to discuss future developments (“We are planning to improve this, what are you doing about that ?“) or simply to improve people’s knowledge of the various distributions.

Of course, this could easily turn into flamefests, but they are technical ways to avoid that, like moderating posts from trollers…

Does something like that already exist ? Do you think that it would be interesting ? Would you like to contribute to such a forum ?

Some examples of things that could be discussed:

• How many packages do you have, and how do you support them ? Do you have several “classes” of packages ?
• How do you manage your releases ? Goal-based ? Time-based ? Bug-count-based ?
• Which kind of quality assurance do you do ?
• How many contributors do you have ? Are they split into different “classes” ? Who has “commit rights” ? Can you give out “commit rights” restricted to subsets of your packages ? A organized sponsorship system for people who don’t have commit rights ?
• etc, etc, etc.

After Dell, Lenovo decided to ask users which Linux distribution they should put on Thinkpads. Seriously, who cares? If I buy a laptop that comes with Linux pre-installed, my first step would be to reinstall it from scratch, exactly like with a laptop with Windows pre-installed. Because the choices that were made wouldn’t match mine (think of partitioning, etc). Or simply because I wouldn’t totally trust the hardware manufacturer.

So, what would make me happier about a laptop?

• That installing any recent enough mainstream Linux distribution works without requiring tricks
• That it’s possible to buy it without an operating system, with no additional charge (and no, I don’t buy the “we need the OS installed to do some quality tests before we ship” argument. USB keys and CDROMs have been bootable for years.)

I couldn’t care less about which distribution comes preinstalled. If Lenovo wants to make me happy, there are two ways:

• Talk to free software developers: kernel developers, etc. Not distribution developers. And get the required changes merged in, so they will land in my favorite distribution after some time.
• If they prefer to play on their own, they could create an open “Linux on Lenovo laptops” task force, where they would provide the needed drivers in a way that makes it dead easy to integrate them in Linux distros and to report problems.

It’s not _that_ hard: some manufacturers got it right, at least for some of their products. There are many manufacturers contributing code directly to the Linux kernel, for network drivers for example.

But maybe this is just about marketing and communication, not about results? Because after all, Dell and Lenovo will look nice to the random user. While playing-by-the-rules manufacturers are hidden deep in the Linux changelog.

I just finished signing all the keys from the FOSDEM KSP.

Importing keys I received:
Mutt is nice. You can tag all messages with ‘t’, then use ‘;’ (tag-prefix) and ^K (Ctrl + K) to import all signatures. (Thanks Myon + sam for the tip)

Signing keys:
caff (featured on debaday last week) has some useful info in /usr/share/doc/signing-party/, especially the README.many-keys and README.gpg-agent files.