[arch-dev-public] Goals / Mission Statement

[Aaron Griffin]

On 6/8/07, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Below is Essien's response to this thread....


And now mine.  I let this thread flounder just a bit (I've actually
been really sick, but that's beside the point) in an effort to see if
anyone else had some more opinions.  It appears not, so here is a
compiled list of all the things discussed here.  They have not been
trimmed, and as such there are some duplicates.

The current set of goals, as stated by Judd, above:
- Simple design
- Remain a "install once, run forever" distribution
- Continue to be a strongly community oriented distribution
- Remain a lightweight, general purpose distribution
- Not be dependent on any graphical interface
- Provide the latest software as is practical

New suggested goals:
* A clean movement towards multiple architectures.
* Internal organization could improve somewhat so that growth spurts
  are not counter-productive.
* Provide the latest software within the confines of a consistent
  user experience
* Maintaining simplicity in all things, including packages and utilities
* Backing the community, and letting users flourish around us.
* Binary distribution.
* As few changes to the original package as possible.
* Do not get in the way of the user
* Help as much as possible (without violating 'not getting in the way')
* Include the community in as much of this as we can.
* Be up to date but never broken
* Simple and lightweight.
* Keep the community involved.
* A lean, clean and mean system that is transparent
* A distro that helps and actively encourages distro builders to base
  on it for serious applications.
* Provide easy to use tools for extending working with ArchLinux and
  derived distros...
* Even though the distro has a clean and transparent API, we should
  still have scripts to manage and administer base system, so we should
  either provide them or foster and environment where such are provided.

So here's what I'd like to do.  Lets look this over, and see if
there's anything we disagree with, and bring it up.  I will go through
and compile everything after we see how discussion goes, and then we
can bring up the contentious points in the next dev meeting.  In
addition, if it is easier for you (it is for me), you could rank them
in order of importance, so we have a nice little "#3 is fine as long
as it doesn't violate #2 and #1".

I'll start with a little ranking, the way I see it:
1) Maintaining simplicity in all things, including packages and utilities
2) Clear support for multiple architectures (includes tools as in the
second to last point above)
3) Backing the community, and letting users flourish around us.
4) Be up-to-date but never broken.
5) General purpose by default, allowing others to add features
("distro plugins" ? can I copyright that term?) [examples: a -docs
repo, kdemod, 3rd party tools, etc]

Anyway, let me know - I know this is slated for the dev meeting, but
it's silly to not discuss something this large beforehand as well.