[PureOS] Let's stablize PureoS Green

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

On Thu, 2019-03-21 at 16:21 +0100, Tobias Bernard wrote:
> > We have to go with Debian stable. Debian testing has presented too
> > many
> > obstacles to stability. We have an obligation to ship stable
> > software
> > to our customers.
> 
> I think this is the core of the problem. We need both a reasonable
> degree of stability and frequent updates to user-facing things, which
> requires fresh versions of large parts of the stack.

+1

> Debian stable is moving way too slowly for that, but it sounds like
> there is no good alternative to it at the moment.

I think that a Debian stable 'base' with flatpak on top and/or
backported apps will serve us well. Already parts GNOME 3.32 has come
into the 'Experimental' which means that it will hopefully make its way
into Testing later. Have parts of the GNOME 3.32 desktop already in
experimental shows that there is interest in Debian in having the
latest GNOME. 

In addition, things like Geary are already flatpak'd. I'm running a
3.32 version of Geary here on PureOS Green.

> If we're committed to Debian as our base, perhaps we should propose
> overhauling the release model or adding a separate stream of stable,
> but
> more frequent releases that would allow a release cadence more in
> line
> with the needs of a consumer-facing OS (i.e. major updates once or
> twice
> a year). I assume others might be interested in this as well, seeing
> as
> it's exactly what Ubuntu et al. are doing on top of Debian already.

I think that it's always worthwhile to look at release process and
cadence. My experience tells me that releases are best when coordinated
and planned. This can be really hard given the moving parts and the
fact that there are a lot of upstreams we rely on (GNOME, Debian, Linux
, Coreboot, etc.)

> > I'd like to see if we can't discuss this with GNOME. Integration
> > and
> > release cadence really could be better coordinated with Debian I
> > feel
> > especially given that the current GNOME Foundation director is a
> > DD,
> 
> That would be a great start :)

I'll ask Sri to help us with the contacts and get some discussions
going. Perhaps we can join the GNOME Foundation in an official
capacity, although I assume that has already been discussed. 

> I know that the foundation (and GNOME community more generally) would
> be
> really interested in a nightly OS developers can dogfood, so perhaps
> there is collaboration potential there.
> 
> > but perhaps there's work behind the scenes going on already that I
> > don't know about.
> 
> Not as far as I know, but would be good to look into that.

+1

Regards,

jeremiah
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