TinyMe is Splitting From PCLinuxOS
Open Letter of Explanation to the Community
EDIT: Just as a clarification as to the article on DistroWatch, TinyMe is part of Unity Linux. That will be our new base.
I and many others who have packaged and/or developed for PCLinuxOS are leaving. As of this time, we find we cannot work with the leadership of PCLinuxOS.
When Texstar left several months ago, much of the burden of packaging and development fell on Gettinther's shoulders. Starting several weeks ago, tensions grew in the development team. Things eventually reached a point where Sal and Gettinther could no longer find it tollerable to work with the leader and Gettinther announced his departure on the developer's mailing list.
I sent Gettinther an e-mail indicating that wherever he went, I would follow. I told him to come over to TinyMe and we would fork the repos and continue on our merry way. I was pleasantly surprised when, in an exchange of e-mails, he explained to me that he had been contacted with basically the same offer from someone else– and then other remasters of PCLinuxOS started joining us, like Granular, Keldix, eeePCLinuxOS, PELinuxOS, as well as some semi-independent developers. At this time, the count of people who have joined our development group has swelled to over 20. If the manner in which we have contacted anybody seems underhanded, it was unintentionally so; we simply wished to make as few waves as possible.
I wish to reassure Tex we are not at all out to slam or smear him. You will find no ill speech of him in any conversation of mine either public or private. I am sure that is true of many, if not all, of the other developers in our group. We do not wish to damage PCLinuxOS, but we feel it has been wrenched from our hands.
TinyMe's Future
At this time, the developers of the new distribution are working on fleshing out all the little details. I can tell you that we're going to be working on a common core. Think of a ring of developers. Each leads his own distribution and each distribution contributes back to the core what it can. Each distribution will have its own repo section for whatever packages are unique to it. We are not simply going to fork the PCLinuxOS repositories and continue updating them; we are going to build a new core from the ground up.
What does this mean for TinyMe's immediate development? Well, Alpha 2 is going to be delayed for quite a bit. It will probably be a couple of weeks before we can build up the 600-800 packages required for a TinyMe install. I will keep you updated via this blog as best I can.
Linkbacks
Unity Linux « Spiral of Hope, 2009/04/05 10:13 (Pingback)
Discussion
I am sad to hear that and I can't really understand all your feelings for all the works that you have done. But I think you have your own reason for doing so and you must have think thoroughly.
I hope to see a new improvement on this distro and I believe that you have a bright future as well. Good luck on your hard work.
Will TinyME continue to use PCLinuxOS repositories or will there be a new ones?
There will be new repositories. If we stuck with the PCLinuxOS repositories, we would still be PCLinuxOS-based.
Does this mean that we should wait to update / upgrade? I do not wish to experience the update / upgrade problems I did when I had PCLOS installed! I like PCLOS but this last update / upgrade thing lost my interest in PCLOS for awhile…too many problems in getting my system back up and online!
There's no guarantee that you'll be able to take your current TinyMe installation and upgrade it to our new base. You may be able to do it, you may find it impossible.
You could keep upgrading TinyMe 2008 using the same repos, but we'll stop supporting TinyMe 2008 on the forum after a while.
Maybe a little update on what the team is doing will keep us from wondering what's happening.
The best way to find out is to join the Unity forum:
http://forum.unity-linux.org/
I'll check out Unity for sure. I'll see where I can lend a hand.
I can't wait for things to get rolling. I may want to remaster TinyME.. ;)
That was me. I've since joined the team.
Gentlemen,
I am truly sorry that differences arose between the leadership of PCLinuxOS and the many derivatives of that effort. I have long valued the packaging integration expertise of Texstar, and I rate it right up there with two of the other experts - Warren Woodford of MEPIS and Klaus Knopper of KNOPPIX. Though there are many great distributions out there, I believe that these three men have probably had more of an influence on the shape of distributions over the past five or six years than anyone since Patrick Volkerding first started distributing Slackware and Ian Murdock started with Debian.
Many of you, however, have made your own mark as well, and perhaps the time is ripe to branch out and make it just as clear that several of you have just as many great ideas and integrating skills as these other gentlemen, and though the circumstances were unfortunate, let's hope that this change will usher in a whole new set of packaging capabilities.
I don't know all of you on the team yet, but I had already started to develop a fondness for kdulcimer, who not only has produced a great distribution of his own, but he has had a positive influence on one of my other favorites - antiX, created by anticapitalista. I don't yet know Gettinther well, but I've heard nothing but good things about him.
I wish every one of you well, and I hope to be an active tester (and possibly promoter) of your future efforts.
Again, though I am sorry that the “differences” had to result in a split, I do congratulate each one of you for refusing to say anything derogatory in any way against your former partners in development.
I know that at least two of those great integrators, Texstar and Warren Woodford, great as they are at their craft, tend to be very weak when it comes to communicating effectively with others - the outside community - people like me - have to dig and scratch to find any information about the products until they are practically ready to go out the door! Only the strong communities of PCLinuxOS and MEPIS have helped to get the word out so that people like me can test, report issues, get them fixed, then praise and promote the resulting effort. I say that gently; I have the highest regard for both men. Each of us have our own sets of strengths and weaknesses, that is for sure!
It is my sincere hope that as your organization develops that a group will be put together that leverages the strengths and weaknesses of each person, and puts it all to effective use. We are not all great coders or integrators - I am not a great coder at all, though I was once a software developer. I am a tester, a communicator, and a promoter, first and foremost, a voice of reason, and a “cheerleader” of sorts.
Thanks for all that each of you do. By all means feel free to tap my strengths to help you test, evaluate, and communicate my opinions, which I will always do in a civil manner. I hope I can be helpful to your efforts as well as the efforts of other projects. I am not out to “pit one against the other”. I think that we have such a diversity of distributions because there are such diverse groups of people using computers with diverse needs and diverse interests. Free software is about embracing those diversities and leveraging them with many creative alternatives, and this project seems to be off to a good start to form a solid platform from which those ideals can be further cultivated and improved even more from their already solid foundations.