[PureOS] Bits from PureOS | 2020 edition

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

Hello faithful readers!

Your attention, replies, and hardwork made 2019 a great year for this
mailing list. There's been a huge increase in communication here and
I'm grateful for the discussion, feedback, and guidance. 

I'm dropping this link here to let those who read this list know that
we've had a summary of the past year published; 
https://puri.sm/posts/2019-year-in-review-pureos/

With that posted, it is time to look towards 2020 and layout what the
priorities are for the new year. Without question I think the number
one priority from Purism management is the PureOS Store. In my
discussions with Todd about the Store, it is clear not only that it is
a high priority, but that the store can be a way to bolster PureOS and
its large archive and get Free Software into the hands of users. This,
I feel, is hugely important to our mission and so I'm going to
prioritize it at the top of the list. 

Fortunately, this has been an idea that has already been floated and
there is work that's been done towards realizing a store or easily
accessible archive in some form or another. I hope to be able to pull
the disparate threads together; work done in Laniakea, frontend work
from Rodolfo and Francois, as well as other infrastrucutre bits to
realize the goal. I hope to organize this work in the coming weeks and
try and set out a schedule so we can track and measure our progress
and, most importantly, communicate the work that's been done by the
team because I think it's quite amazing. 

More regular releases for the folks who install PureOS on machines on
the factory floor is also a high priority. We've come so far now with
our releases - amber and byzantium - that it's time to support them
with a bit more predictable release cycle and more Quality Assurance.
To do that let's pick up the thread on releases, I'll try and revive
that.

Matthias K. has mentioned OpenQA as a potentially useful tool for doing
QA on our releases and I agree, I hope to set that up for us before
FOSDEM so we can use it. I have a couple other small tasks to complete
before that work can be started as well as some administrative
housekeeping, but I'm really eager to get more QA for our releases
since we've come so far the last year or so. 

And yes, FOSDEM! I'm going to be there for about a week. I plan on
attending the MiniDebCamp: 
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/be/2020/MiniDebCamp 
It would be great if all got a chance to meet up in Brussels, I would
really appreciate it. Just having the opportunity to speak face to face
would benefit me tremendously and having a chance to outline all of our
goals and plans for 2020 will be an added bonus. 

Thanks for reading this far!

Best,

Jeremiah