[PureOS] Let's stablize PureoS Green

[Guido Günther]

Hi,
On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 03:10:05PM -0500, Omar wrote:
>    On 3/14/19 1:52 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> 
>  Quoting Jeremiah C. Foster (2019-03-14 18:57:44)
> 
>  What do those folks on this mailing list think? Should we keep PureOS
>  Green on Debian (Buster) Stable?
> 
>  Above is strongly tied the related question of what to do about cravings
>  for exciting new $stuff as Buster (non-)evolves to become steadily more
>  boring over its multi-year lifespan.
> 
>    I might give you another perspective from an intermediate user. What some
>    of you 'OS nerds' ;) consider boring, I'm guessing the majority of our
>    customers see it as a very functional, cool as-is tool to get things done.
>    As long as privacy and security improvements don't get stagnant... And any
>    customer that may be as advanced as you guys, will know the ways to make
>    it un-boring :)
> 
>  Do we...
> 
>   a) Tell users to wait for it to become boring enough?
>   b) Maintain a local fork as .deb in PureOS for each wish?
>   c) Maintain a local flatpak for each wish?
>   d) Tell users to include .deb/flatpack maintained elsewhere?
> 
>  With a) I say yes let's do it.  But I expect others in the company to
>  not really want that option for several years, not even for enterprise
>  users. Testing that is simple: Imagine PureOS being Stretch until 6
>  months from now (i.e. until Buster becomes boring _and_ we finish
>  testing that it really truly is boring also with our adaptations).
> 
>  With b) I say no: We lack manpower, procedures, and infrastructure to
>  handle that - including security tracking but also other things.

Currently I doubt we'll be able to maintain just one baseline. So having
a color track stable and another one testing (snapshots) makes sense to
me. Yes this needs people and infrastructure but I don't think purism
will scale out otherwise.

> 
>  With c) I say that those responsible for flatpack maintenance need to
>  evaluate when they are ready - including security tracking but also
>  other things.  Which implies that it is a no if PureOS team has that
>  responsibility.

Flatpak doesn't handle things like updated drivers, system daemons etc
so this will only work for a subset of problems at hand. In my
simplistic world view flatpak solves the 'updated app" problem to some
extend (which is a hard one by itself) but it doesn't help you with
baseline updates - so it's rather on top of all the other alternatives.

Cheers,
 -- Guido

>  With d) I say no: It is irresponsible of us to point our users
>  elsewhere.
> 
> 
>   - Jonas
> 
>     - Omar
> 
> 
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