openSUSE:Base for derivatives strategy proposal

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openSUSE - Base for derivatives

Statement

We are a diverse active and inviting community delivering the best foundation for Linux derivatives by providing a high quality, long-term supported core distribution, with tools and infrastructure to easily build on top of it. We encourage projects and developers to create additional building blocks and specialized spin-offs and provide a platform to make them visible and appreciated.

The center of this strategy is a high quality and long-term supported core distribution surrounded by tools to build derivatives which includes remote system administration. Behind that we will have a marketing team spreading the word about our Project and the derivatives made with it. Additionally, we will provide derivatives for desktops, server usage, software and web development. To be successful we see the collaboration with upstream and other Linux distributions as a key factor in providing quality derivatives.

Key ideas

  • reduce the number of packages in Factory
    • provide smaller, stable, high quality core distro
    • provide Long Term Support (LTS) for this reduced set
    • core suitable for servers
    • available for more platforms (including ARM, PowerPC, etc.)
  • provide platform for building derivatives around core distro (onion model)
    • building blocks - software grouped by theme Build Service - repositories)
    • infrastructure for building spinoffs (Build Service - kiwi image build / SUSE Studio)
    • spin-offs promotion ("gallery" for spin-offs with ratings, download links, etc.)
  • support diversity
    • openSUSE as a base for MeeGo, OpenWRT and other projects
    • desktop spin-offs for users (KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce)
    • specialized spin-offs like Education, Photo edition

Activities

We need to be excellent in the following

  • provide stable core packages with LTS (Factory)
  • openSUSE Build Service
  • provide tools for remote system administration
  • process/mechanism to qualify those custom distribution for usage of openSUSE name/trademark
  • large testing of various OBS repositories combinations

We will try to do the following effectively

  • provide the openSUSE distro as it is today (no long term support)
  • provide environment for web development (webserver/database stack)
  • provide development tools for C/C++, Java, C#, J, Python, Ruby, ...
  • collaboration with upstream
  • collaboration with other Linux distros

As project, we will not focus on the following anymore

  • There are many packages that exist in Factory and we don't know if they are used or needed. We'll have them in major OBS projects only.