[PlanetCCRMA] The future of planetccrma?

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 19:50 +0000, Jeff Sandys wrote:
> I saw Jesse Keating speak about the new Fedora at the Northwest
> LinuxFest and I thought about the future of planetccrma.  Fedora 7 will
> merge core and extras, use 'koji' as a build system and develop a
> series of distributions.  With koji planetccrma could be a distribution
> branch of Fedora, but according to Jesse koji is not ready to do that
> with the real time kernel yet.

I would have to to look around the code. I did Planet CCRMA "one dvd"
distros for fc3 and fc4 and I hacked anaconda to have it install the
proper kernel. Most probably that's not a big deal but what do I
know? :-)

> I see that planetccrma is the result of Fernando's effort to maintain
> the electronics music lab at Stanford, and many of us are grateful for
> his effort.  But this is a big effort for one person, I do not see a
> large community of people contributing to the planetccrma effort.  And
> I do see large communities around SUSE JackLab, Ubuntu Studio and
> Pure:Dyne.
> 
> So what is the future of planetccrma?

Bright and rosy, of course!

> Will the Stanford Lab adopt SUSE JackLab or Ubuntu Studio? 

Or Studio64 or Gentoo with the ProAudio overlay or... you name it. 

A switch to another distribution at CCRMA would be a substantial effort.
I considered doing this a while back for another reason but the
advantages were not big enough to justify it. Maybe this time around it
would be different? I don't know. I have not looked in detail but
switching would probably still involve quite a bit of packaging (in a
sometimes completely different environment) as not all Planet CCRMA
packages will be there (or maybe I'm wrong). And a lot of research
beforehand. 

> Will a community support Fernando to make a
> planetccrma distribution with koji and Fedora 7? 

I'm waiting for fc7 to restart my Planet CCRMA distro. Should be easier
than before (when support for doing target specific spins was not even
there). 

There are already more players/helpers in Planet CCRMA that you can see.
Some of its packages have already migrated to what was Fedora Extras and
is now just Fedora and other people are maintaining them (sometimes
starting from scratch as some packagers like to reinvent the wheel,
sometimes using my packages as the starting point :-). The long term
idea is that Fedora should be able to be a music distro out of the box -
the kernel is probably the most difficult part to integrate. But Ingo
works for RedHat so there's motivation there... (not that _music_ or
multimedia is the motivation for his realtime kernel work). 

The infrastructure for help is there in the Fedora contribution system -
ie: contributing and maintaining extra packages for Fedora. Setting that
up locally was one of my goals but reality intervened and I could not
dedicate the needed time and resources. Still, most probably a redo of
the Planet CCRMA primitive but useful web site with an eye to allowing
external contributions will happen sooner or later. 

> Or what? 

Most probably "or what". It is very difficult (ahem, impossible) to
predict the future...

As long as CCRMA itself keeps supporting Linux Planet CCRMA will be
around in some form...

> I support
> the Linux community and the use Linux to create and study music, and I
> what to know where to direct my efforts.

Obviously it'd be great if you stayed around...
Wherever you end up, good luck! And keep making music!
-- Fernando

PS: email responses will be short and slow for a while as I'm in a
trip...