id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,resolution,keywords,cc,fix_version,see_also 450,spread the gospel of Debathena packaging,geofft,,"It occurs to me that a fun side project would be to get some other people using the techniques we use for building on top of Debian/Ubuntu releases without doing all the work of release management and distro maintenance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions#Debian-based et seq. may be worth looking at; in particular there are a couple of government- or university-sponsored distributions that change some artwork and default settings, install a few more packages (mostly from upstream), and change little else. These are presumably fairly easy to move to the Debathena configuration and build system. For instance, West Virginia University's CS department has a distro that ""attempt[s] to make the exact same environment used in the classroom and laboratories available to every student""... sound familiar? More ambitious would be to get an Ubuntu or Debian derivative intended for the general public to adopt our stuff. Linux Mint, for instance, already requires Ubuntu's apt repo, but adds some packages and rebuilds some others with patches, which might mean that our debathenificator etc. infrastructure would be helpful, but might also mean that they've developed a solution that works better for their use case. Even in the latter case, though, they may be able to benefit from config-package-dev for packaging at least branding changes.",task,new,normal,The Distant Future,--,,,,,