Debian derivatives census: ArcheOS: status?

[Luca Bezzi]

Dear Paul,
sorry for may late reply, I was travelling a lot for work in these days...

On 03/13/2019 03:19 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
> 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.

No problem, just forward my message (sorry initially I just replied to 
you and later I added Alessandro and Fabrizio because they were involved 
in my answer but I did not check the CC of the original mail...
> That is unfortunate, I know how hard it can be to create a community
> where people naturally transition from users to contributors.

To tell the truth we had many users (also some universities used ArcheOS 
for their project and even for teaching), so the project was going on 
fast initially. We started to have problem trying to keep a good Debia 
distro (repos, source packaging, etc...), due to the fact that in that 
moment we needed more developers than users and, as I wrote you, very 
few people helped us in the development...
> I think it would definitely be possible to transform ArcheOS into an
> official Debian subproject.

This would be great! Could you give us some tips about how to start? 
Snow is melting and the season of excavations is starting, so we will 
have few time for internet and computer... Any help is important for us :)
> 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

Yes, this could be useful

> 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.

Yes. It would be nice to keep the name of the project to reactivate the 
old community. Do you think there would be problem about it?
> 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.

Yes, I think a Debian Pure Blend could be the best way. Currently we are 
a little bit busy (because we will work a lot on the field and not 
always with an internet connection), but we can start slowly to migrate 
ArcheOS into a Debian Pure Blend. Do you know if someone could help us 
in this migration?
In the meantime I will take my time in the evening to check the software 
list, update it and try to understand the state of the art (which 
software is already packaged by Debian, normally more and more every 
year; which software we can drop; which software we really have to 
package; which software we have to test on the field, etc...).
Is it OK when I post some news (also this discussion with you) on ATOR, 
to keep the community up to date?
> Are there other parts of the archaeologist community that are using
> Free Software / Open Source?

Yes, when we started we tried to open the world of archaeology to FLOSS 
and open knowledge (we called informally this project OpArc: Open 
Archaeology), so we initially (2001 -2002) just focused on the complete 
migration to FLOSS (we were using a lot of different closed source 
software); later we started ArcheOS (around 2005) and we also started, 
in 2006, a conference about archaeology and FLOSS: This conference is 
going on so the community is becoming bigger and bigger nd there are 
also some other friends who started in developing single software for 
archaeology (that normally we were integrating into ArcheOS). We also 
work a lot in Open Data and recently with the wiki community (another 
problem for us is to be active in all of these communities, with 
different rules, etc...). In short the community of users is becoming 
bigger and bigger (to tell the truth not many using Debian, almost just 
the users if ArcheOS); many people use other distro (Debian is still 
considered "difficult") and a lot of people using also closed OS 
(especially Windows) with FLOSS. I have to say that in this ArcheOS was 
working very well, becaus a lot of people was migrating from Windows to 
ArcheOS because they get all the software they needed within the distro.

> 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/

Yes, I know. Fortunately a lot of GIS are already packaged, but some are 
missing. Unfortunately many times we have to keep a single obsolete GIS 
just because it is the only one that can perform a specific kind of 
processing.

> I note that the Debian science team have packaged several parts of ROS.
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Robotics/ROS

Yes, I know. We will go on with ROS for sure during this year, going on 
with test in underwater archaeology and also for speleoarchaology 
(undergroud). Hardware is developing very fast, so every year there is 
something new to test :) (this is the research work thata takes us most 
time in these years). I am trying to develop a ROS based open hardware 
portable device to be used in many different field archaeology contexts 
(trying to involve the University of Torino and other research institutes
> 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
>

It would be nice. These months I have to finish 3 other articles, but 
later I guess I could find the time to write a fast overview about FLOSS 
and archaeology

Have a nice day!