Ubuntu Education [Was, Re: Proposal: sunset the backports pockets]

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Erich,

This seems largely orthogonal to the point of the thread, but I think it
warrants a response.

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 10:18:36AM -0700, Erich Eickmeyer wrote:

> Additionally, sunsetting things like this are sure ways to permanently kill 
> them. I look at Edubuntu as a prime example: it was sunset, and those that 
> have wished to revive it have been denied that simply because "it died before, 
> what's to prevent that from happening again?".

With both my Technical Board and Release Team hats, I am entirely unaware of
any efforts to resurrect Edubuntu.  So, who was wishing to revive it, and
who dissuaded them?

That said, when talking about an official flavor, which implies an ongoing
resource committment from the larger Ubuntu developer community (i.e. the
Release Team), it's entirely appropriate to ask questions about the level of
committment from those proposing the flavor.

> Somebody made an "Ubuntu Education Remix" because they felt they could
> never revive Edubuntu because they'd be denied that ability.

Well, in order to be able to call itself an Ubuntu remix, it must be using
software only from the Ubuntu archive.  When I google for this and download
the iso, inspecting it shows that it hasn't enabled any archives aside from
Ubuntu... but the customizations to the live environment (which are
primarily branding) are done by modifying the contents of the squashfs
directly, with no packaging associated with it.  And there is very little
educational software I can see having been added (the only thing I managed
to work out from the package list was epoptes-client).  There is an
interesting mix of package selection, with ubuntu-unity-desktop as the only
metapackage installed but packages preinstalled from a wide number of the
different desktop flavors of Ubuntu.  I'm sorry to say I don't see much here
that looks like the seed for a revived Edubuntu.

If this matures in the future (packaging of the remix-specific branding and
submitting to the archive; proposed metapackages with some clear
relationship to the claimed target of the educational market), the option to
make it an official Edubuntu flavor always exists.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                   https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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