As far as I know, and I haven't checked for some time, the only two people working on DebianDog developments are fredx181 and rcrsn51. You'd have to ask them if they are interested in your idea. Certainly I've noticed Fred often contributes help, ideas, and utily/apps to the Puppy community (not just his Dogs) but he seems recently to have been a bit less active than previously. That may simply because DebianDogs work well - with no major issues that I know about (though I've lost touch with DebianDog developments so haven't really any idea about that). Fred's build systems certainly seem to work well from DD user reports, so I'm not sure what benefit woof-CE 'synthesis/sharing' would bring to him; on the other hand some of the relatively recent work Fred has done, such as implementing tinycore-like method of loading sfs files via symlinks (which is method wanderer likes) would probably be useful to Puppy too if it moves (in total or as an alternative) to overlayfs rather than aufs. Forum member rcrsn51 originally was a key contributor to Puppy with his many well-written Peasy apps and he also has his DebianDog-related build scripts I believe.
The developers of FatDog on the other hand, which started out pretty much as a Puppy extension before becoming an independent distro design, seem to directly support Puppy itself quite strongly, on the side at least.
I would think that any such 'synthesis' or merge would likely require Puppy crowd to acknowledge that it is no longer the dominant distro amongst the pack - even perhaps the distro with the most to gain from collaboration, though I do suspect from these more recent developments (such as innovations apparent in this dpup OS1) that Puppy has an excellent future ahead of it whether it more formally 'joins' with others or not.
I certainly imagine most of these non-Puppy devs also want to see continuing active development of Puppy itself - all Linux distros seem to benefit from the overall health of all others, and even more so, I feel, when they share a forum.
But would the devs of these other seemingly perfectly healthy distros want to become part of woof-CE, which is afterall promoted as Puppy build system (and the forum, come to that, promoted as Puppy's forum)? None of these alternatives are Puppy derivatives, so like the forum itself such 'synthesis' would likely, it seems to me, require equal promotion, respect, forum organisation/space, and some way of indicating that Puppy linux itself, though traditionally the only distro discussed on the forum is but one of the increasing many. Since each distro most often has its own website (and associated domain or subdomain of some sort), the only way I could see all these matters fairly addressed would be for some other 'neutral' domain that the likes of fatdog, debiandog, and puppy itself redirect to (where the shared forum would reside, and a new development/build git site named accordingly) - but even as I say that I pity poor rockedge! TheKennelsLinux.com???
Even if mutual collaboration only remains the best model of interaction likely to occur between such distros (rather than each having own branch at a 'TheKennels' shared woof-CE site), it would still be nice if the in-common forum they shared was not named and organised only in terms of one of them as if it were dominant still. Anyway, time will tell, and the alternative is to leave things as they are where some distros and their devs will perhaps move away entirely, eventually (or not) to their own space (forums, wikis and whatever). I suspect some old-timer Puppy guards would prefer that - however... No doubt the common shared forum interest (and its active members) is what has prevented that drift away thus far - the forum is as much a social space, as a generic technical discussion space, and thus effectively a long-established 'Linux-related' home for its members whether they still actually use Puppy or not (as some of them do, and some of them don't).
EDIT: I should say that I don't think the shared but 'less than equal shared' forum is much of an issue really. Pretty much all the 'other' distro devs seem fine with just an entry or two to briefly discuss their own developments and to help out more generally when they can. Build systems are a bit different though, as are individual distro's main websites. Certainly, the forum is not perfect from that point of view, but history has its effects such that nothing is ever perfect anyway and the importance of this forum is as I say mainly a social/technical one and I doubt most really care which distro is being discussed. The number of active users on the forum does not appear to me particularly high anyway (though seem to be a few new non-oldtimer members recently, which is a really good thing to avoid old bickers and boredom...) - very little congestion therefore and most of us know the existence and location of the other distro threads and websites.
Actually, alas, I remember all too well the opinion of one woof-CE dev when I simply once posted a list of "Distributions created by forum members" since I felt that 'other-than-Puppy' distros were pretty low in visibility down in Puppy Projects thread on the old forum. https://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=115557 NOTE I've written the link as https but won't work unless changed to http but I'm worried rockedge would be mad at me if I used http since that style has apparently caused forum hacking issues (though I don't understand the details). Same first post can be found here (https ok with this one though I still need to update its internal links to new puppy-related https urls): https://www.tinylinux.info/post/distrib ... m-members/ Actually I don't write much about the DebianDogs there, but I did in the end add more about WeeDogLinux since that is what I am myself concentrating on.
mavrothal wrote:...all this cataloguing is indeed just to provide more visibility to specific efforts.
Is OK for a developer to promote the distro of choice but I still do not see any value in this selective cataloguing in the expense of all the rest, for the reason I just said above.
I did not hear anything to the opposite yet.
Only that debian dogs deserve more visibility and acknowledgment.
This is fine, but let's be clear about it.
That past resistance to change forum to reflect usefulness of all distros contributed is what leaves me doubtful overall and still somewhat fighting the old-timer resistance is futile, who cares about anything but Puppy, sort of negativity (despite that no longer being so direct as it used to be). Anyway, times have changed to some extent (new forum here at least) so perhaps visibility of other distros is no longer so frowned upon, and personally I couldn't care less if someone loves Puppy or loves DebianDog or whatever, or doesn't, but I am interested in seeing all forum distros develop and applaud all such efforts. I cannot be bothered with old-timer stick in the mud conservative approaches however - all possibilities should always be on the table, but that does not mean that all suggestions need be accepted - community should decide that - not just those capable of contributing to woof-CE or accepted there by the old-guards.
wiak
