Since this is one of those topics where people are just talking freely more or less, I feel like thinking out loud.
So take it all as just that.
The recent posts have got me thinking I should personally step up and try and use woof. I know @mikewalsh recently did so and got a working puppy out of it.
I should be qualified. I've compiled a good ten packages of software in the past year. I even figured out that if you type ./ in front of a script or application name in the directory you're running from, it will run the script, even if that directory is not in the system path.
That was a revelation.
I am only a musician of course, but we musicians tend to be good learners. Trial and error, practice makes perfect, etc...
But do we really want guys like me trying to build OS's and possibly sharing them with a wider community?
People with coding knowledge, experience, and training would be such a better option. There was recently a poster, a few months back, who said he just graduated school, and wanted to build a pup and asked a lot of questions about it. Is he still here? I should do a search, but I don't remember his handle or any of the post titles.
Marketing, what about that? There seems to be a lot going on around this forum that younger computer grads should be excited about. Recent efforts to make desktops more appealing by people like @pp4mnklinux come to mind, being that there's initiative to 'Get it out there,' seems like something at least a few computer nerds would be interested in.
I think puppies, Kennel-linuxes, dogs, remasters are the best thing since the invention of ice cream. They all deserve to live and thrive, and not wither up for lack of interest.
All of the people developing on the forum, @dimkr, @peebee, @rockedge, @amethyst, @fredx181, @wiak and all the people I'm forgetting to mention, really do have an impressive amount of output.
Focus seems to be the missing ingredient. For sure everyone is highly focused on their projects, but community wide the lens is cloudy.
There's actually so much going on that the war is very wide indeed, as was evidenced by the efforts to get a pup up on distrowatch.
What would it take to attract a younger, wider interest in building pups, especially using woof?
I don't think anything like that could happen without a community ethos that allows for submitting the interests of individual projects to a larger goal. Being that puppy is one of those "herding cats" cultures, seems unlikely for an ethos like that to take hold.
Still I can dream. It's one of the skillsets of musicians.
Maybe as community of shared interests, we could craft and agree on at least of selection of important questions. Things like:
1) Should puppy be the relegated to the domain of 'runs on old hardware?'
2) What's the feature set that makes a forum OS out-of-the-box user friendly?
3) Are update friendly OS's and rolling releases the future? Or is the feature set of puppy the fact that it's not updateable, and a whole new build is necessary?
4) What produces the most marketable, feature complete, and polished OS most quickly and efficiently?
5) What's the best way to develop as team? More hands make lighter work.
Stuff like that.
Not that anyone would even agree that my list of questions is relevant.
But I'm just talking. Why not?