Report from Debcamp Custom Distribution BOF

July 17th, 2003

Debian-Nonprofit was represented at this years' annual Debian conference, Debconf3, and the more loosely organized preceding "Debcamp" by Benjamin Mako Hill, Enrico Zini, and others.

On the last day of Debcamp, Debian-NP helped coordinate a BOF meeting for developers involved in custom distributions, subprojects, metadistros, and flavors within Debian. The meeting was attended by developers involved with the more familiar custom Debian distributions as well representatives of Skolelinux and Metadistros

The meeting ended with two major conclusions:

  1. They agreed as a group to try and reduce the confusion around the terms subprojects, subdistros, flavors, and others by referring to their projects as Custom Debian Distributions. The group felt that this term acted to contrast custom distributions aiming to create customized versions of Debian with other types of subprojects like the technical committee and the IPv6 team. They also felt that the term reinforced the fact that these projects aim to work fully within the Debian system rather than to branch from it or to focus on one part.
  2. They agreed to try to put effort into increasing the amount of communication between custom distributions. Since it is currently unclear if creating a mailing list for custom distribution discussion is necessary, the group decided to report to each other and the project on the whole through debian-devel-announce and to carry on custom distribution related discussions on debian-devel prefixing their messages with [custom] in the tradition of Debian-Desktop.