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Adam's Leaving


David Batson
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Late to the party as I usually am....

 

Adam, good luck with your next steps, and you and I know you deserved better.

 

As for Mandriva, I'll continue to use it as long as it's usable.

 

Creating a fork? That will be an option if things go that way - it is not that time yet, IMHO.

 

I love Mandriva the OS as far as I love any computing platform, more than any other computing platform. I've never really loved the company though.

The developers have done an amazing job on a shoestring budget, providing quite a few 'first-time' linux common user features: first freely available distro to do ntfs resizing during installation, great tools, etc.

Ubuntu is only now coming closer (not there yet, though I haven't checked in a while).

As I wrote, I'll continue to use it as long as it works for me.

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I personally don't think it would work maintaining Mandriva as a community based distro. It might go well at first, but as time goes on, the work would fall upon the 1 or 2 super dedicated individuals. Then as time goes on, there would always be something "more important" to do than helping out others (ie. maintaining the distro). But if it was maintained by the community, what would the difference be between that and Debian?

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orts: I really haven't done much on Bugzilla for a few months, I just haven't had time. If anything it's been Pacho Ramos and Stephane Teletchea taking care of it lately. I've only been handling matters of policy for the bug squad, and bugs that are listed in the Errata or that come up while I'm doing the forums.

 

surfer: "I have been chewing over the very same thoughts since this affair started. The next question is what does one need to maintain a distro, as in disk space etc. Aso the very big question I have asked myself, what does it take to produce and maintain a distro?"

 

To maintain an entirely independent distro takes quite a lot of resources. I think for a fairly basic desktop-only distro you'd need at least the equivalent of five to ten full-time maintainers, with a high degree of technical competence. You'd need a reasonably powerful build machine / cluster (Mandriva has five i586 build hosts that were cutting-edge hardware a couple of years back, and three x86-64 build hosts that were cutting-edge last year). It's not a particularly easy endeavour. You can run a piggyback distro like Mint or (to a lesser extent) PCLOS with fewer resources, but then you don't really control your own destiny.

 

Mandriva has, by my rough estimate, about the equivalent of 30 full-time staff working on the distro, plus maybe about an equivalent 20 further full-time staff provided by volunteers. Even that is basically a skeleton crew; other distros have far higher maintainer : package ratios. It'd be very hard to independently maintain a distro the size of MDV with any fewer bodies.

 

edit - disk space is, in fact, an issue, because you have to store all your sources, plus their history (well, you don't HAVE to store the history, but it's a really good idea - Mandriva's complete package revision history is stored in SVN/CVS), for all your releases. And it's a really good idea to do it on a proper RAID array (so you need even more space), and keep it properly backed up (so you need a whole second set of drives, or a proper tape backup system). Our build cluster is forever running out of disk space.

Edited by adamw
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Thank you Adam you have answered my questions fully and a bit more. I wasn't thinking of starting my own or forking from Mandriva. It was something that I started to think about. :thumbs:

I forgot to mention I am starting to slow down a bit now. I'll leave all the worries to the younger fellows.

Edited by SilverSurfer60
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