Ubuntu Studio built by Canonical using Universe.

[Cory K.]

Hello all.

Since this is my 1st post to the list I'll intro myself. I'm Cory. Head
of the Ubuntu Studio project.

So. The reason for writing. The team and I, in a further push to keep
close to Ubuntu, want to have our disks built and hosted by Canonical.

At UDS-MTV I briefly chatted with Mark about this. He was for it. I have
had several chats with him after that and again over VOIP from Sevilla.
His support has seem to have continued. We have always needed to
coordinate with Colin though. Understandably so because he is THE man. ;)

We had some things to work out 1st. Mostly creating all the necessary
packages then getting them into the repos. Unfortunately for us we
didn't have them all done for the Feisty freezes. Its OK because our
target for getting our disks built was Feisty+1 anyway. We will have all
our packages in the Gutsy repos this week. Yay for us! :)

Since getting the packages into the repos was wrapping up I
contacted Colin on IRC. After some chat Colin said we need to contact
pitti and try to get the packages we use into Main. Instead of
contacting pitti directly he said a ML thread would be best.

Getting all the packages Ubuntu Studio uses into Main. I
respectfully say I don't see this as a viable option as we use MANY
packages from Universe. Here's our package list as of Feisty:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio/PackageList

I don't see this as a option for 2 reasons. Time involved in getting
these packages into Main and more importantly, I feel there's no way in
hell all the packages even would be accepted. :)

So. What can be done? Only thing I can think of is that the normal build
process could be modified to included building from Universe. I'm sure
this can be done as we have built our disks this way. It might just be a
matter of resources which I'm sure are tight atm.

Hopefully a solution can be found.

-Cory