Hi Jeremiah, On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 4:58 AM, Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Clark, Rob <r...@ti.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pi...@linaro.org> >> wrote: >>> On Fri, 6 Apr 2012, Ricardo Salveti wrote: >>> >>>> On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 6:05 AM, Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> wrote: >>>> > The fundamental question really is 'are we a distro or not'? > > Tom Gall said; "We are." > Joey Stanford said; "Linaro is not a Linux distribution." > Jeremiah said; "I'm confused." > > Is there a way for Linaro to clarify the distro / non-distro position? > > There are lot of "distributions" that say "We're not a Linux distro!" > but in reality they tie you to their dependency resolution scheme and > their build system, (I'm looking at you Yocto.) If Linaro is or isn't > a distro, can Linaro then please define, and adhere to, what it is? > This would likely help clarify the release cycle and the stable / > unstable dichotomy. If you're a distro you likely need a stable > release, if you're just "shiny Linux kernel for ARM" then I guess you > can just do rolling releases, but even upstream seems to have "long > term kernel releases."
Here's my take on it and please understand it's my take. There really isn't a clear definition or test for what is and isn't a linux distribution. So much so the term could in some ways be useless. However there are a number of crisp attributes we can be clear on. Does Linaro do world class engineering, creating new features pushing them upstream? Yes. It's one of our major goals. Does Linaro have a package and build system? Yes. It follows in the footsteps of ubuntu/debian. Can you request features? Sure. We love it when people show up at Linaro Connect, start a discussion in irc or post to one of our lists with ideas or technical items that need discussion. We like to work with others. Can you report bugs? Sure. Linaro don't make any promises when or if a bug will be fixed. Linaro has at times decided to put off even what would be considered high priorities bugs because work is going on what was considered high priority features. Does Linaro have long term support releases? No. Does Linaro keep up on the latest in security fixes? No, Linaro doesn't even have a security team. If something that is security related and it's fixed in the ubuntu archive, as long as that package isn't overridden you'll get that fix too but still the important thing is Linaro doesn't have a security team. Does Linaro support a wide variety of architectures? No, Linaro focuses entirely on the arm architecture. I could go on and I'm sure you have your own list of attributes that are important to you. Does this help? Probably not. But in this thread I don't think the "is Linaro a distribution" is the important question. It's the attributes surrounding what Linaro does that is most important within the context of the goals set by our members as well as how Linaro to advanced Arm on Android & Linux. > Regards, > > Jeremiah > > _______________________________________________ > linaro-dev mailing list > linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org > http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev -- Regards, Tom "Where's the kaboom!? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!" Marvin Martian Multimedia Tech Lead | Linaro.org │ Open source software for ARM SoCs w) tom.gall att linaro.org w) tom_gall att vnet.ibm.com h) tom_gall att mac.com _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
