Results of the Core Meeting

Photo by Levin on Unsplash

On the weekend we had a core meeting of siduction devs to talk about the future of the distribution. Proposed goals were the lessening of the workload, specialy for our main dev Alf (agaida) and more frequent releases. Other than that we had the revival of the siduction manual on the menu (which was in fact a fork of the excellent Bluewater Manual from the sidux days).

Lessen the workload

When it comes to lightening the workload, the only feasable way is to cut down on the number of images we produce. Reason for that is that some of the desktop enviromnents we ship have had no maintainer for a while. For the next release (which is not far away), we stop releasing images for the desktop environments GNOME, MATE and LXDE. That leaves us with images for KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon and LXQt. We also keep releasing the minimal entry points noX and Xorg.

That does not mean, users cannot use the desktops we dropped anymore. They are still available in the archives. We just stop customizing and producing images dedicated to them.

Advanced CI and CD

Besides that we will try to advance our Continuous Integreation and Delivery provided by Jenkins to churn out automated builds on a daily or weeky basis (no details decided yet) and make succesful builds available to our users. These builds will only be marginally tested, but we will make sure they boot correctly and the installer is in usable shape. These images will mostly work correctly, but are no replacement for the approved official releases. We have not yet decided, how these will be made available to you, but a dedicated forum section might be the easiest way.

Not a small feat

The siduction manual in it’s recent formfactor has been unmaintainable for a while now. Also some of the information in there is deprecated or needs to be adjusted. We plan to move the formfactor from (partialy badly written) HTML to Markdown (MD). Both of these tasks will have to be done manual and in conjunction in order not to move stuff to MD that will get kicked out afterwards. Once that is done, we will present the manual on a new platform that can turn MD into a visualy pleasing, easy to use and to maintain format. Volunteers wanted!

Artists in dire demand

Besided that we will be working on stabilizing the artwork in a way where it scales more correctly on all possible resolutions. Unless somebody with skills in the fine arts volunteers to supply us with artwork per release we will have to stick to what we are using now (which I find totaly acceptable) .

Contributors, step up

That being said, we have been keeping siduction rolling since 2011 with a small and more or less stable team and the support of you guys. What we would need is a stronger dev team to be able to work on new ideas and projects. So if you feel intrigued by working on the edge, come to IRC and talk to us. You do not need to be a software developer. We would love to have people with skills in art, translations, web-developement and maintainance, or just people with a passion for debian and siduction. We will for sure find something to do for you.

Last but not least we will try to get a booth at FROSCon 2019 in August, which is held in Siegburg, close to the German city of Bonn.

One thought on “Results of the Core Meeting

  1. I found your page by looking for links to alternative kernals from the AntiX Linux page.

    https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-19/FAQ/index.html

    So searching “kernals siduction” I get your page. The problem being I look around for several minutes and I have no idea what you are trying to do. What is the goal that you have?

    I’m not trying to mean but it would seem a short about page with a general idea of the point of all this, I assume, fabulous work you’re doing would be nice.

    I may even be at the wrong place for looking for linux kernals but I can’t tell if I am or not because there’s no short “statement of purpose” that I could see. Yes there is a German wiki but I don’t speak German and that’s my failing but some pages are English so…

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