On Thu, 31 May 2007, Alan Burlison wrote: > Make no mistake, I'm personally opposed to Indiana being the 'reference > distribution', mainly because I think it is a divisive label that in the long > run will discourage other people from setting up new distros.
This was brought up at SVOSUG by David Comay, but it wasn't really answered too well. The concern, which I also have, is that a distribution becomes a reference, and vendors build their software to that reference. We have seen this with Red Hat centric distributions, and that doesn't seem good for our community in general. Companies like Legato and/or Intel have packaged products for Linux that are RPM centric, and in most cases programs like alien will handle converting the RPM to a dpkg, but not all cases. Oddly the software runs fine on Debian distributions for the most part, if one installs on Red Hat, tars it up, and moves it to a Debian system. I personally think there's some mis-communication between what Ian has thought about and/or said, and/or what it really means, and that mis-communication might not really exist if folks understood what Ian means by some of the things he says. For instance, Ian uses "Linux" in a lot of his references, and I would rather he used open source software, but I'm not splitting hairs on this issue, just pointing out that there hasn't been enough stated that is clear enough for most folks to understand a project like Indiana as a whole. It will probably mean a lot of different things to a lot of people, including the various people that work on it. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group
