RE: Rough development plan

I have read many comments about the more distant future options for SME. 
Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to make suggestions about what 
distribution to move SME to, I lack the knowledge.

Without showing too much ignorance, has any one thought about contacting the 
owner of one of the other possible distributions to see if there would be any 
possibility of providing assistance in such a move?  Some of the lesser distros 
may well provide the needed features but this team may not have enough dev help 
in making the move.  The owner of a potential project may offer help, 
particularly with the installed base of SME users - if the move is successful, 
the newly combined project would have a pretty large audience from the start. 

I do agree with others that have posted, making a move to a new distro would 
likely be an enormous task and should be put off for a future time. I think 
this kind of question/answer/comments session would be better viewed in a forum 
(my opinion).  Lots of questions/answers etc, then once a small number of basic 
plans are defined, the contribs group can open a poll and get votes on which is 
the direction to go (though I think votes should be restricted to those who 
activly participated in the discussion).

I believe the short term goals as was described in Brad's initial email, would 
be to define the next release:  

<quote>
We will maintain up to four feature / package plans: 
1. The current minor release feature plan (ie the one we are 
developing). Right now, this is the 6.1 release plan. 
2. The next minor release featureplan (which will be opened just before we 
close the current minor release plan - features that aren't ready get 
moved back a release). This will be 6.2, if there is such a release. 
3. The major release feature plan (cool stuff that can't make it into the 
minor release because it is too intrusive). Right now, this will be 7.0. 
4. The next major release feature plan (which opens when the current major 
release plan closes. This would be 8.0. 
</quote>

Even though RH is ending support for their current release in April '04, if 
it's stable at that time, why not continue efforts to adopt that?  Their 
support may end but if SME uses just a small subset of those core pieces, would 
it be prohibitively difficult to maintain those pieces by this small (but 
dedicated) team?  At least for a time, while the bigger discussion of what 
distro to adopt gets hashed out and defined.  If this is done, it would allow 
the contribs team to get comfortable with all the specifics of what makes SME 
work as it does and define a detailed, all inclusive list of what would need to 
be done to make a move to a new distro.

I'd like to comment, this discussion is likely similar to a conversation that 
the SME management team had with their dev team recently, just prior to 
deciding to drop this project.  An uncertain future for several possible 
distributions and lots of work regardless of direction.  

Dave

[email protected]
www.shipmanhome.net

--
Please report bugs to [email protected]
Please mail [email protected] (only) to discuss security issues
Support for registered customers and partners to [email protected]
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
Searchable archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo%40lists.e-smith.org