Debian derivatives census: ArcheOS: status?

[Paul Wise]

On Tue, 2019-03-12 at 12:01 +0100, Luca Bezzi wrote:
> Dear Paul,
> I am Luca, one of the developers of ArcheOS.

Thanks for your reply.

Would you mind if I forwarded your message to the debian-derivatives
and archeos-dev mailing lists so that there is a public record of your
reply? Alternatively you could reword your mail and reply again, CCing
the two lists and Stefano Costa as I did in my initial mail.

> 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.

That is unfortunate, I know how hard it can be to create a community
where people naturally transition from users to contributors.

> 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

I think it would definitely be possible to transform ArcheOS into an
official Debian subproject.

We have a Debian mentors list where there are people who review and
sponsor packages for inclusion in Debian and answer packaging questions
for people who get stuck in that process.

https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers

I don't know how much packaging help you would get from existing Debian
contributors but forming a Debian Pure Blend for archaeologists would
provide a point of focus for improving Debian for archaeologists and
thus attract folks interested in both topics, possibly expanding the
set of people working on them beyond Arc-Team.

A Debian Pure Blend is subset of Debian worked on by a team that works
on improving the use of Debian by a specific community of people (such
as archaeologists) by using Debian for that purpose, promoting use of
Debian in their community, reporting the results of that use to their
community and to Debian at (mini-)DebConfs, helping community members
work on and join Debian, fixing issues with Debian the community
discovers, adding software to Debian that the community needs, curating
a set of collections of software (using metapackages), subsetting
Debian in live images and so on. Some more info is available here:

https://www.debian.org/blends/
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends
https://blends.debian.org/blends/
https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/

I've included below some ways the Debian community overlaps with
ArcheOS and might have advice or synergies.

> 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.

Packaging is often time consuming but improving upstream projects to
avoid workarounds can reduce that burden.

> the software selections takes us a lot of time because we have to use
> the software in professional projects

Are there other parts of the archaeologist community that are using
Free Software / Open Source?

> e.g. GIS

Debian has a team that produces a GIS blend and packages GIS software:

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianGis
https://www.debian.org/blends/gis/
https://blends.debian.org/gis/

> (currently we re using ROS with several SLAM nodes)

I note that the Debian science team have packaged several parts of ROS.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Robotics/ROS

PS: it might also be interesting to write an article for LWN about the
use of Free Software & Open Source by archaeologists.

https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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