at the developer gathering in oslo we had a short meeting about how technical development will continue after the 1.0 release. I thought that i could post the few notes that i made during the meeting with questions, on who looks into this and how things should be done.
future version It will contain newer packages and hopefully be based on testing, if there will be a security infrastructure in place by then. upgrade path extensive testing will be needed for ensuring that the upgrade is possible. some packages have changed debconf variable names (slapd comes to mind) and it would help to be able to scan for these variables, automatically. what other systematic problems might be there? sarge packages petter presented a list of packages which should go into testing to be able to base skolelinux on it, later. some were removed from the list, some are in testing allready and some need more work. one which most likely will need not only work but some good ideas is the ltsp package. 16 groups, filesystems NFS supports only 16 groups per user. this is not enough for us. we want MORE. the correct fix is to switch over to a real network filesystem. people have offered help with AFS. I contacted several and tried to muster their support and get them informed about skolelinux and how help would have the best positiv impact. THis will most likely involve kerberos in skolelinux. Cerebrum, user management um, what did we say about this? this is if cause the newly developed user admin tool that we hope to use in later versions. can someone fill in this blank? user friendly interface, webmin This is most likely the thing that will make or break skolelinux in the future. Webmin is not suited for "normal" users, but there are no alternatives. one possible solution would be to identify the tasks executed by "normal" users/admins and try to pave their way well by giving the webmin apps a facelift or perhaps even a rewrite. it is unclear yet what is really needed and used today. flexible network configuration not surprisingly, there exists a webpage on the skolelinux website with a howto on this. the real fix/solution would be to make the network fully configureable and more intelligent. squeak very difficult license, not distributable in non-free. possible solution is an installer package which could go to contrib. squeak seems to be a real resource-hog. it is doubtfull that many users can use it on a normal terminalserver at the same time. ilias this is kurts favourit learning-management system, since it has heavy develpment teams and support behind it (like cerebrum, but better because it is germans doing it :-). there are however 50+ learning-management systems out there and we need an overview of what is good and what the best solution would be. Everone agreed that we do need a learing management system.
