[Ichthux-devel] choosing packages

[Ben Armstrong]

On 5/10/05, Marco Silva <mamsbrl at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with Raphael. For me, as example, I will focus on server side,
> software to help church administration (that is my strength), but I
> know it is not the time for that. We need focus each step at the time.

There is nothing wrong with working on church administration & desktop
in parallel.  Unlike the Knoppix demo CD, we don't need to be working
on a *single CD* that contains all of Ichthux.  Instead, we should be
thinking about making it modular from the beginning, broadly sketching
the various ways Ichthux will offer something distinct for each of
various different Christian user needs.

So I don't think it's so much a matter of deferring until later steps
that must be done in sequence.  Instead, we should choose to not
address *at all* steps that can be completely omitted by deferring
those steps to other development groups inside and outside of Debian.

Take church administration, for example.  What is so very different
between administering a church and administering any non-profit
organization?  So an obvious "blend" of CDDs in this arena is
Ichthux+Debian-NP.  Take NP's install CD and supplement it with
software unique to church administration (CHADDB, etc.)  I believe
with a small amount of additional effort on top of what these other
CDD projects have done, we could rapidly come up with a whole set of
CDs, each addressing a different Christian user base.  Where each of
these projects diverges in how they build their CDDs and therefore
complicates our work, we encourage them to work towards using a more
unified approach.  Where each of these projects lags behind in areas
that are important for our work, we offer help with their own projects
as much as we are able.

Ben