Debian derivatives census: ArcheOS: status?

[Luca Bezzi]

Dear Paul,
I am Luca, one of the developers of ArcheOS.
Regarding its status, I have to say that we have problems in further 
develop our project due to the fact we did not have a great feedback 
from the community of ArcheOS. The problem was/is that most of the 
archaeologists that approached ArcheOS became users, but not developers. 
Thank to the help of Fabrizio Furnari we were able to move the project 
to Debian and start source packaging (also thanks the great help of the 
French archaeologist Romain Janvier), but maybe the step has been to big 
for us, because of the amount of hours to dedicate to packaging. Me and 
my friends of Arc-Team are very busy with our work (and families :)) and 
all we were able to do in the last years was to test new software to add 
into ArcheOS (the software selections takes us a lot of time because we 
have to use the software in professional projects to understand which of 
the many solutions is the best and often we have to use a combination of 
several software of the same time, e.g. GIS, to reach a good 
compromise). Moreover we started in 2006 to work with open hardware in 
archaeology, especially for extreme missions (UAV, ROV, etc...), and its 
integration with ArcheOS takes also a lot of time (currently we re using 
ROS with several SLAM nodes). The result is that we are going on in 
experimenting new things, with good results, continuously updating our 
ArcheOS version, without being able to release a community version (with 
repositories and all).

Do you think it would be possible to transform ArcheOS into an official 
Debian project or subproject, in order to have an help in 
source-packaging (or also just in packaging)?
Is Debian Pure Blend something similar?
We are open to any solutions

PS
we are also not able to update in time our research in our blog ATOR 
(http://arc-team-open-research.blogspot.com/), but I will try to write 
more in the next months

Thanks for your time and have a nice day!

  On 03/12/2019 09:21 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
> Hi Stefano, all,
>
> I'm wondering what the status of ArcheOS is as I noticed that some of
> the ArcheOS infrastructure is down or unused. The doc and apt repo
> domains are gone, the wiki URL is gone, the IRC channel is empty, the
> Distrowatch page says that the project is dormant and the github
> repositories have not seen recent changes. On the other hand there have
> been recent posts on the website and blog.
>
> Is ArcheOS development likely to continue?
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/ArcheOS
>
> PS: if the issue is maintenance of infrastructure, you might like
> to merge the project into Debian in the form of a Debian Pure Blend,
> which would have the use of the Debian archive for package storage.
>
> https://www.debian.org/blends/
>