How should Puppy be developed when Barry steps down?

[cb88]

puppy will require a real developer to continue i believe we have a few around

if your not a developer then the best you could ever do is some form of remaster. Note: i am mostly still at this level myself but working toward being a developer

The svn i have setup on sourceforge is not just for puppy but for the scripts ie grafburn pfind etc... it would be very helpful to have those all in one place instead of haveing to sift through the forum for new versions i don't think that the developers would even have to upload them themselves but anyone with svn access could (i'll have to add you)

note: anyone can download from svn

ttuuxxx has mentioned that T2 7.0 has problems ie broken links in the source downloading ... to fix that we could use the SVN or wait untill 8.0 is released supposedly in the late summer/fall then download all the source and host it ourselves which is ideal anyway since we could all be working from the exact same source

iirc you can just manually extract source into T2 and it will find it but im not sure about that and im not in a position to be able to check

personnally i am very pro T2 since i can't really see ever automating a gnomeslack build of puppy....but it might be possible

[dogone]

As a politician would say, "I both agree and disagree a little about a lot of what you said."

Every one of the preceding posts in this thread contains some wisdom. That's the way it works here @ Puppy. Everyone contributes something, whether they be a gardener, music teacher, engineer or couch potato. Puppy has survived by virtue of Barry's leadership and wonderfully active and open communications.

In my book, people are not "developers", they just do "developing". And anyone who contributes their time, ideas or experiences to this forum is helping to "develop" Puppy Linux. So don't start looking around for developers to save Puppy. They're already here and they are for the most part, "us" - you and me.

Puppies don't have rank, they don't wear badges or power ties. Puppies play, and they play hard. We are all here because we love the experience, the people and the OS. Puppy Linux is meant for us to enjoy and learn from and we can do that with any version. Even if there is never a version 4.2, Puppy will live on for years. We have time to reflect and time to plan.

Reading the previous posts, I'm starting to hear people talk about which aspects of the Puppy project have worked well and which have not. What are the community's strengths and what are its weaknesses? What do we want to do with Puppy? I think these are the questions we must first ask ourselves.

[ttuuxxx]

I Have often wondered if we could split puppy into 2 distros, That it could actually be smaller and work better.
With T2 if that stays the norm, we should be able to compile all base packages at one including the kernel, Thats how its done now with the latest version that I'm working on. With some adjustments we could have a Smaller Xvesa model and a larger Xorg model, The Xvesa model could be for really older computers and hardware support, i386,i486 and the newer one i586,i686.
Another thing that has always given puppy a black-eye is logins, So many post on the forum about being root 100% of the time. I don't have any problem with being in root, actually it would be one extra step every time I boot up puppy that I don't have to do now. But for the users to feel secure would be nice, Also it would make a puppy server much more secure.
We have had attempts in the past at building servers, Maybe that could be part of puppy's future also, If we get the login/permissions implemented and if the team is large enough, It would only seam natural to also build a server edition. That would be a developer intensive release. Maybe post on the main homepage "Looking For Developers" I've seen other distro's doing this, actually arch Linux has a post on the homepage for developers. Not for this sort project.
These are just Ideas I'm tossing around.
ttuuxxx

[WhoDo]

2.x CE is a prime example of killing a project off by telling devs to go take a flying flip.

Why ever they told the developers in 2.15ce to take a hike, well that was then.

Wrong!!!! At no stage were any developers of 2.15CE told to "take a flying flip" or "take a hike" or anything of the sort!

Perhaps you are thinking of the Talking Stick CE project - based on 2.14R and coordinated by ecomoney (Robert S). I don't know what the devs were told on that project; I wasn't involved.

2.15CE remains arguably the most successful community project - some might vote for 1.09CE, 2.03CE or even 2.16CE, but my view is they were basically puplet projects following community ideas rather than a true community development project. I coordinated 2.15CE and I can assure you, I spent most of my time encouraging, assisting and supporting the developers who brilliantly donated their time and energy to the project.

[ttuuxxx]

2.x CE is a prime example of killing a project off by telling devs to go take a flying flip.

Why ever they told the developers in 2.15ce to take a hike, well that was then.

Wrong!!!! At no stage were any developers of 2.15CE told to "take a flying flip" or "take a hike" or anything of the sort!

Perhaps you are thinking of the Talking Stick CE project - based on 2.14R and coordinated by ecomoney (Robert S). I don't know what the devs were told on that project; I wasn't involved.

2.15CE remains arguably the most successful community project - some might vote for 1.09CE, 2.03CE or even 2.16CE, but my view is they were basically puplet projects following community ideas rather than a true community development project. I coordinated 2.15CE and I can assure you, I spent most of my time encouraging, assisting and supporting the developers who brilliantly donated their time and energy to the project.

I'd have to agree with WhoDo on that one, he was one of the key figures for that release, Plus its been awhile since I've booted it, But it had developer written all over it, like the blinky script was rewritten for icewm by I think, MU, the menus were rewritten by another developer, plus other advancements like the "flash patch" etc. I do think a lot of ground breaking development was build by developers and others for that excellent release and if we look at that as a project model for future Puppy releases we would be doing an excellent job.
ttuuxxx

[Auda]

Way back when, I used to loging here every day and read what was happening, not any more its all rush rush to get the next version out bugs and all.
Puppy 109ce was great I still use and install it on mates mates computers. To be honest I havent tried 2.15ce but most of the other versions have seemed to be unfinished and buggy many little things like not samba printing and cut and paste either not working or not well.
Hopefuly without Barry in the lead things will change and puppy can be seen as a stable distro that "just works" rather than, just about works.
Auda

[puppyluvr]

Hello,

@Ttuuxxx, I agree completely.. 215ce is a shining example of a community effort, doing the best with what was available. I cant wait for the 3.xxCE.....

To the point at hand...My question is...Who runs puppy now??? In almost a year here, Ive never seen Barry say "No, you cant do that, do it My WAY.." Barry wasnt a "ruler" he was/is a developer. He will continue to develop, no-one that brilliant just stops....
Puppy is a community, and should be governed as such...

If Barry had said, instead, "Im taking an extended vacation, but Ill be back", would it have created so much drama, NO.. The finality of "retire" sent everyone off. If we thought we had to come up with an "Interim" management system, rather than a permanent one, I believe we would have pulled toghther, not divided.

Puppy doesnt have to change at all. We may not have a developer of Barrys status, IDK, but if we Pull Together, not Apart, we can manage. And its not like Barry is dying, he`ll still be around. For Gods sake people, a great man has given us a great task, to pull together and carry on with his "Baby", the best damn distro around. That speaks of a lot of trust. Will we let him down???

Im no developer, (Duh) but Ill do whatever I can..And, I will learn. I am devoted to Puppy, So are Many others. I dont think Barry intended Puppy to be the "End All" Linux.
( Ironically, I believe the innovations Barry buitl in to Puppy may make it that anyhow!!)

We shouldnt be trying to guess what Puppy will be, We should continue to develop what Puppy is, to refine it, to fix all the things mentioned in this thread. The future will be there when we are ready. WE have Puppy now, Puppy is what it is, and what we make of it.
Puppy can, and will, go many different ways. Nothing new. I trust the "community" with the "official releases". The new kernels will come, lets make the most of the ones we heve first, and move on at a reasonable pace, to allow getting the most from what we have. I thought 3.01 had a long life ahead of it, but.....

Oh yea, SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on all those who made our forum negative....
I hope John deletes the whole thread.....makes Puppy look bad.

Solidarity, thats the answer...
United we stand, Divided we suck....
But what do I know...........

[ttuuxxx]

Hello,

Solidarity, thats the answer...
United we stand, Divided we suck.... <--- That made me laugh
But what do I know...........

[disciple]

But I guess that's your choice since you seem to think you don't need them anyway.

You could try reading DC. I've consistently said that I believe Puppy DOES need to be developer-focused to remain successful. You on the other hand were implying that because Barry's mission statement made Puppy developer focused when he was developing it, this isn't allowed to change when he stops. Of course it's allowed - if he allows it; even though I don't think it is wise.

Another thing that has always given puppy a black-eye is logins, So many post on the forum about being root 100% of the time.

Are you sure? I haven't noticed that. I guess in theory it would be good if it was easy to set up more users. BTW do you refer them to the excellent article Nathan put on his blog as an attempt to encapsulate why root is fine?
I actually think you mentioned the most likely reason for a fork before - Slackware compatibility.

I do wonder about all of you complaining about bugs and instability in recent releases though. There were significant bugs with CUPS and SAMBA in 3/3.01, but apart from that??? How many bugs does 4.0 really have? Taking dotpup handlers and stuff out isn't a bug. If lots of people need help figuring them out, it is a documentation problem, not a bug. But maybe the problem is really that people know Puppy "just works", so they don't read the release notes

OOPS - you've all dragged me completely off-topic

[technosaurus]

Coding/developing - One of the main issues that will have to be dealt with is code documentation which is written in BarryK - don't get me wrong, its all good code but the documentation was not intuitive to understand - it took me hours to partially understand the initrd coding- I learned a lot but afterwards I kept hearing the puppy login bark in my head - woof- woof There it goes again

packages - slackware compatibility was mentioned earlier but it could be any distro really as long as there are sufficient packages, maybe just use T2 and pacman, entropy or some other package manager that can compile from T2 (or whatever distro) source if a package is not available from puppy repos
also .pup, .pet or .sfs? or go to tgz, deb, rpm...? also kind of important that we choose a standard - preferably one that is easy to maintain so that we can increase our package selection to be somewhat competitive

direction - use the forum - ideas/suggestions and polls to achieve user input similar to brainstorm.ubuntu.com - granted we will still need capable developers to implement them but I know we have a lot of talent out there

More revenue streams (in addition to those previously mentioned) similar to damnsmalllinux.org, but use eeepc, ebox and DecTop systems (available from wdlsystems and dataevolution respectively) - both work with puppy, there is an eeepc and ebox version already and I will donate one of my spare DecTops to a developer who can make a DecTop optimized version compiled with gcc 4.3 (for geode optimization) and including the geode xorg driver, ltmodem, rtl8150, cs5535 etc... I tried - no luck so far

Developer rewards by forum nomination poll or as percentage of donation

more puppy versions for distro hoppers - more interest=more site visits = more potential revenue
<50MB(biz-card CD), <96MB(128MB flash), <192MB(256MB flash or mini-CD), <300MB (biz-card DVD), 700MB(CD), 4GB(DVD = all versions + puplets multiboot) - I won't delve into the opera-seamonkey-firefox debate etc.., but more release announcements typically brings more interest - release versions every 2 weeks = 12 weeks continuous on the distrowatch charts - 36 weeks if you have a free(seamonkey+gnash,486), non-free(opera+flash,586/geode) and firefox(686) version - released in order of size (basically just add packages) for easier development - add 3 alphas, 3 betas and 3 rc1 and 3 rc2 and you basically have a 1yr release schedule between major version changes

version the forums so that people discussing puppy 2, 3, 4 and later versions don't get confused by inapplicable info

wiki documentation team - great volunteer project for many puppy users that want to contribute

puppy promo team - to irritate Bob Barker and spread puppies everywhere - no spaying or neutering here

website maintenance - there are several puppy sites - many old ones that are no longer maintained or nonexistant and many dead links - we definitely need a lead maintainer and possibly a team of volunteer helpers

lead developer? or head developers? it would be an easier transition if someone who understood all of the puppy inner workings could take the lead since versioning could be tracked on their system - multiple contributing developers (more likely?) would require a tracking system - something to think about anyways if sticking with T2

[puppyluvr]

technosaurus,

@ Wow, where have you been hiding.???

[technosaurus]

technosaurus,

@ Wow, where have you been hiding.???

I have been away from puppy for a while looking for a good server distro for primary/secondary school and finally decided on Karoshi over Edubuntu and needed a good distro for non-thin-clients and puppy is by far the "best of breed" in this category.

I did come across some puppy-useful utilities in:
Thinstation - ability to select kernel modules and programs - could be used for building zdrv_XXX.sfs and pup_XXX.sfs (its "TS-O-matic" script also makes iso, pxe,nbi,floppy boot...)
Nimblex - Online build tool similar to thinstation but more GUIfied- could be used to build pup_XXX.sfs and maybe zdrv_XXX.sfs
Slitaz - ability to boot from the internet

My current project is building a puppy web desktop using many of the sites suggested at http://tmxxine.com/g/ , but I am going to use a dropdown "start" menu with familiar puppy categories next to a show desktop icon that displays the default "desktop page" which will have an invisible table with various search boxes and icons that will take you to the more popular web-app sites. Future versions will hopefully have multiple, selectable web-desktops & other added features.

Another note - we may want to look outside the community to other small distros to recruit participation or maybe even consider some sort of merge with project having similar goals - thoughts on this?

[Béèm]

I have been away for some 8 weeks.
Where does the idea come from that Barry Kauler is stepping down/stopping with Puppy?
Any reference/link?

[alienjeff]

@Béèm

You mean to say you don't read Barry's blog?

http://puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00269

[Bert]

@ Béèm:

http://puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00269

[Béèm]

@alienjeff and @bert
Thank you for pointing in the good direction.
After those 8 weeks of absence, I probably went too quickly in browsing Barry's log and missed that one.

[nutts4life]

This is amazing stuff.

Let me introduce myself first, as alot of you know me as the annoying guy who asks stupid questions on the forums.
Looking at technosaurus and what he has been doing. My ideas for puppy are exactly the same. amazingly i also own a dectop and I created Pupeez v1.0 for it. (NOTE: without the geode driver, but it works fine in xvesa...SORRY), so i never really mentioned it was designed for the dectop.
I also own an ebox AND i'm also looking to the future of the desktop in the amalgamtion of web and hardward based OS's etc. I'm currently working on a puplet for the ebox. This doesn't make me a developer, and i'm not sure i ever will be again as the developers of puppy are just too good.

Technosaurus made a comment earlier about he was looking for a non-thin client OS. It's an interesting description of these new types of PC's (mini-laptops, eboxs etc), but there is no other word. Why? Becuase really nobody knows what they are. There is no clear linux distro that is designed to run on devices like these so companies are being employed to create their own.... but nobodies looked at puppy, when puppy is the clear best of breed.

I guess the point i'm making, is I beleive Puppy is the future of OS design (potentially by accident) becuase i beleive these types of PC are the future of hardware design. What an opportunity! And what a positive for puppy but this seems to be only known by puppy users not the outside world.

I've talked along time about something not directly relevant to this post, but what i'm trying to put across is that:

1/ puppy has some amazing strengths and advantages over other OS's becuase it's unique. It has a unique selling point. I have never seen anybody capture that (other than in Barrys mind). What we need first is a consitution about Puppy. A set description of what it aims to do in the future and what it is. Then we can ask, 'who's with us on this?'

2/ We've talked alot about how we can do it, without writing down the experiences of other distros. I think whats needed is a list of the top 20 distros (on distro watch), how they manage their foundation, what the community provides and what is the key to their success (Ubuntu etc...)

3/ I think we also need to write down what the community gives to puppy and what Barry K gives to the community and therefore define where the line is at the moment. From here we can find out how the line can moved and what needs to be on either side of that line. More than likely a foundation team on oneside and a community on the other.

If we agree with these three needs, let's create a wiki page.
I'm happy to do this, where shall i put it? (don't say on the wiki... i thinking more where on the wiki)

So i'll start by making a comment that treads on the first and third point....just for fun......

Puppy unleashed provides something that no other OS does. The ability to build puppy from scratch (i actually mean on top of a kernel). This has introduced the concept of puplets.
Do puplets add value to puppy OR are they also puppy in themselves (very Kantian)! puplets are as much puppy as the distro puppy 4.1 that can be downloaded from the puppy site.
So, does puppy actually need to be released as distro by a foundation OR could it just be a released as a tool to create distros? where could the line be drawn for the community.

I think we have great developers, i think we have a superb community ... but without barry i think we are worried about losing focus. Let's claw that back first. (pun very much intended)

n4l

[alienjeff]

Oh boy! A constitution and another wiki page! And the possibility of exhumiing the Foundation. All high drama! Time to stock up on pop corn.

[technosaurus]

I've seen too many distros lose their innovativeness when they become too long sighted. I vote that we keep the ball rolling and focus on the next community edition, then the next, then the next...Evaluate the possibilities as we go. There are plenty of us distrohoppers out there to bring in good ideas and lots of talent to produce the new ideas that keep Puppy so good. We have a good community here - I'd hate to see us go the way of Gentoo & thus I have to voice my opposition to a "constitution"

[ekalbaj]

One would think that Puppy Linux should be developed with the same goals that Barry has had in mind all along. I don't think puppy linux would progress or benefit from a whole bunch of outsider or newbie input... but should be reserved for those who are capable or doing what Barry does. Too much input is a diversion and those of us who do not have the expertise or know-how should put our trust in those who do.