What Debian does to make itself friendly to reuse

[Enrico Zini]

Hello,

I was having a nice conversation with a NM applicant about the DFSG and
how it encourages people to reuse Debian, and this came out:

> I completely agree.  It is also interesting to note that freedom to
> reuse is not only applying to licenses, but also to technical aspects:
> derivative distributions can customise the installer to great extents,
> and package configuration can often be preseeded.  Debian-edu has
> contributed several patches to introduce hidden debconf questions used
> for preseeding only, exactly to allow derivatives to alter the default
> configuration of packages without having to tamper with the packages
> themselves.  Also we track bugs in Ubuntu, we have tools to create
> custom mirrors or live CDs, and possibly more.
> I'm not sure if we have a web page listing a summary of all the
> technical things that Debian does to make itself friendly to reuse,
> I'll now ping debian-custom@... about it, because it
> sounds like a good thing to have.

I see such a page as just a short index, with links to more sources of
information.  Like:

 - The installer can be [preseeded]
 - Configuration of important packages can be [preseeded]
 - Many packages support plugging in extra configuration bits in [.d
   directories] or via [update-*] scripts
 - It is easy to build [customised installer CDs]
 - It is easy to build [customised live CDs]
 - It is easy to create a [custom Debian mirror]

The point would be to prove that we're the best available distribution
to derive from.  More of a techno-marketing page than a documentation
page, although documentation would be readily accessible via links from
that page.


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@...>