Simon Josefsson: Soft-launching the DiffOS project
Planet GNU ·
Today marks the day of soft-launching of my Debian derivative, which I’ve been using on several of my own machines for the past year or so. This is still work in progress, but I wanted to establish a launch date of the project so below is the DiffOS manifesto as motivation for continued work. DiffOS is For Freedom! DiffOS is the Debian Increment For Freedom Operating System. Aspire to the goals of GNU FSDG and become a recognized Free GNU/Linux distribution . Uses Debian GNU/Linux as upstream. Support for all architectures supported by Debian. Provide Containers, Cloud Images, LiveCD and installer ISOs. Provide standalone hosting of the package repository. Provide documentation and issue tracker. Keep changes to a minimal, in particular: Upstream-first policy to prefer that any changes are made in Debian, and only if that fails they are considered for DiffOS. Binary package re-use for as much as is possible. Don’t modify any source-level Debian package unless REQUIRED by the FSDG (e.g., for freedom concerns) or REQUIRED by the Debian project (e.g., for branding reasons). Publish a list of packages that are added, removed or modified compared to Debian, with justification for each change. Publish Diffoscope -style outputs comparing our artifacts with comparable Debian artifact. Everything built from CI/CD pipelines, inspired by the Salsa CI pipeline but extended to cover the package repository and installation images as well, to allow modern GitSecDevOps of the entire supply-chain. Use inspiration from other Debian-derived FSDG distributions Trisquel GNU/Linux and PureOS , and broader with GNU Guix especially on how to approach existing freedom concerns in packages. Git Forge agnostic. While currently hosted on GitLab.com, scripts and configuration are (or will be) designed to allow setup on self-hosted GitLab instance, Codeberg.org or self-hosted Forgejo . Maintained by Humans – THE HUMAN MANIFESTO FOR THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE . Happy Hacking!
Today marks the day of soft-launching of my Debian derivative, which I’ve been using on several of my own machines for the past year or so. This is still work in progress, but I wanted to establish a launch date of the project so below is the DiffOS manifesto as motivation for continued work. DiffOS is For Freedom! DiffOS is the Debian Increment For Freedom Operating System. Aspire to the goals of GNU FSDG and become a recognized Free GNU/Linux distribution . Uses Debian GNU/Linux as upstream. Support for all architectures supported by Debian. Provide Containers, Cloud Images, LiveCD and installer ISOs. Provide standalone hosting of the package repository. Provide documentation and issue tracker. Keep changes to a minimal, in particular: Upstream-first policy to prefer that any changes are made in Debian, and only if that fails they are considered for DiffOS. Binary package re-use for as much as is possible. Don’t modify any source-level Debian package unless REQUIRED by the FSDG (e.g., for freedom concerns) or REQUIRED by the Debian project (e.g., for branding reasons). Publish a list of packages that are added, removed or modified compared to Debian, with justification for each change. Publish Diffoscope -style outputs comparing our artifacts with comparable Debian artifact. Everything built from CI/CD pipelines, inspired by the Salsa CI pipeline but extended to cover the package repository and installation images as well, to allow modern GitSecDevOps of the entire supply-chain. Use inspiration from other Debian-derived FSDG distributions Trisquel GNU/Linux and PureOS , and broader with GNU Guix especially on how to approach existing freedom concerns in packages. Git Forge agnostic. While currently hosted on GitLab.com, scripts and configuration are (or will be) designed to allow setup on self-hosted GitLab instance, Codeberg.org or self-hosted Forgejo . Maintained by Humans – THE HUMAN MANIFESTO FOR THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE . Happy Hacking!