Leaving the puppylinux-woof-CE organization

[dimkr]

The declining quality of Puppy releases and Puppy development practices, but also changing priorities, lead me to the decision to step down from my self-appointed maintainer role. I still don't have a deadline other than "soon".

I won't be here to fix years-old issues like #3867 or #1995 and clean up the mess, so:

• Be nice and don't push changes you didn't test properly
• Don't treat git (especially if hosted on something like GitHub) like storage space for binary files
• Ask yourself where the precompiled stuff you're using is coming from (and whether or not this is safe and future-proof)
• Learn how to use git instead of using the error-prone method of editing files through GitHub's web UI
• Do your best to upstream changes you made to woof-CE when producing Puppy builds locally (or at least make them freely available to others, as the GPL requires you to do).
• Automate your work as much as you can and make it fully reproducible, so others can continue your work when you're gone; sadly, Puppy's bus factor is still 1

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants, and sometimes the giants have priorities and exercise their freedom to stop maintaining the things you rely on. If you build multiple Puppy family distros and they all have pretty much the same set of features, issues and limitations (including .pet packages of unknown origin with source code lost to time), now is a good time to consider focusing on quality rather than quantity. Find somebody to maintain X.Org, GTK+ 2, ROX-Filer, aufs, 10k+ lines of kernel .config and sysvinit support in Ubuntu if you want to keep using these things but don't intend to do the work yourself, especially if you're building an Ubuntu-based Puppy or a 32 bit distro (a rare thing these days) but don't want to do any QA yourself. If you're collecting donations from people who download your Puppy releases, remember the giants and help them fund their work.

Since 4b09542, I consider my work on Wayland support (which includes migration away from GTK+ 2 and X.Org), PipeWire support (a necessity with Wayland) and overlay support (in response to the fragile state of aufs) to be complete: woof-CE can produce a Debian-based, Wayland-native Puppy with labwc, overlay and zero "core" applications that rely on GTK+ 2 or Xwayland. Everything is freely available, permissively-licensed, reproducible (no precompiled binaries) and integrated nicely into woof-CE, waiting for somebody brave to start a new chapter in Puppy's history.

I'm still:

1. Fixing important issues that affect Vanilla Dpup, but my "fix in upstream woof-CE first, then cherry-pick the fix" policy might go away
2. Working on Vanilla Dpup 11.0.x at https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/woof-CE and https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/unstable: this small fork of woof-CE is almost fully independent of the puppylinux-woof-CE organization (only uses puppylinux-woof-CE/initrd_progs, but I intend to drop this dependency). I think this fork demonstrates a more focused, clean and sustainable way to develop a Puppy-like distro, especially with few (and busy) contributors.

[dimkr]

Done