From: "Michael Paoli" Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 08:25:54 -0800
Last month's meeting was well attended, many interesting discussions,
Ah, I knew there was at least one other item from last month's meeting I also wanted to mention (found highly terse after-meeting notes).
I forget the precise discussion/question that lead to it, but I think it was essentially about making a custom distro to support or be used for <some particular purpose>. Anyway, I'd mentioned that (well) maintaining a distro is a quite non-trivial undertaking, and perhaps a much better solution would be, e.g. Debian Pure Blends https://www.debian.org/blends/ "Debian Pure Blends Debian Pure Blends are a solution for groups of people with specific needs. Not only do they provide handy collections (meta-packages) of specific packages, but they also ease installation and configuration for the intended purpose. They cover the interests of different groups of people, who might be children, scientists, gamers, lawyers, medical staff, visually impaired people, etc." ...
Essentially, Debian Pure Blends *are* Debian ... it's essentially a (sub-)"flavor" of the Debian distribution. Essentially, certain meta-package(s) are installed, which then have dependencies, etc. to bring in all the relevant packages for that Debian Pure Blend "flavor". There are many Debian Pure Blends, e.g.: Debian Med Debian Science Debian Astro DebiChem Debian Edu and many more. Anyway, my general point was, it may be much more feasible and appropriate to, rather than try to do some separate custom distro., instead, work to create a Debian Pure Blend.