ANN: Sonkei

ANN: Sonkei

[Sonkei release team]

Dear fellow developers,

personal frustrations increasingly alienated us from the Angstrom
"community".  At the end, it did not feel much like home anymore.

Thus, we created the Sonkei distribution project.  Sonkei is a Japanese
word for respect.

 * we want to be treated with respect - from fellow devs and users
 * we want to treat respectfully - other devs and fellow users
 * we have great respect for Angstrom and OpenEmbedded
   They are the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
 * usability - we respect that everybody is short on time

Technically, Sonkei will be an overlay to Angstrom and compiled with OE.
But Sonkei will mainly not be a technical fork, but one focused on how
we interact - respectfully.

Rolf is glad that this opens a venue for him to return to the
OpenEmbedded project which he felt he had to leave out of lack of an
alternative, OE-based distro.  Matthias will bring to Sonkei his
expertise in releasing polished, ready-to-use images gained from his
successful Hentges ROM.

We have already successfully compiled the first Sonkei images.  We think
they are not ready for publication, yet.  We do welcome interaction with
other interested developers - either by mail or in #hentges.net.

The Sonkei release team
Matthias Hentges & Rolf Leggewie

Re: ANN: Sonkei

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Great! Congrats to this initiative! Hope we share lots of patches up- and
downstream.

Regards,

:M:
-- 
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | IT-Freelancer | http://www.vanille-media.de

Re: ANN: Sonkei

[Junqian Gordon Xu]

On 12/12/2007 11:08 AM, Sonkei release team wrote:

>  * usability - we respect that everybody is short on time

I feel your pain. There indeed is a need for people working on 
usability. I applaud the effort.

However, I don't get it how Sonkei differs from Angstrom, except for 
differences in perhaps prefered-versions and individual bb files. Is 
Sonkei something like Angstrom-stable?

Regards
Gordon

Re: ANN: Sonkei

[Rolf Leggewie]

Junqian Gordon Xu schrieb:
> However, I don't get it how Sonkei differs from Angstrom

Hi Gordon,

thank you for your question.

You are right, it might very well be that Sonkei does not differ
technically very much from Angstrom.  Quoting myself:

  > Technically, Sonkei will be an overlay to Angstrom and compiled
  > with OE. But Sonkei will mainly not be a technical fork, but one
  > focused on how we interact - respectfully.

Indeed, it is our goal to stay rather close to Angstrom.  Who knows, if
things indeed changed, Sonkei might remerge into Angstrom.  We plan to
share patches and work with OE - just like Mickey has expressed his
hopes.  We will not only take, we will also give back.  But we will do
so from our own playground.

>  Is Sonkei something like Angstrom-stable?

No.

We cannot promise stability or usability, but we promise to take it
seriously.  Look at the efforts that Matthias made while creating
Hentges ROM.  I believe that is the kind of stuff you should expect.

But usability does not stop at "usability of the programs and images"
for me.  There is also something like "usability of a community".  I
find it hard to describe in a few words that don't sound like I
disrespect the choices Angstrom made.  Trying to condense it down, I
would say that Angstrom strictly enforces rules and consciously raises
the (technical) bar for participation to reduce the drain from newbies
on core people.  To me this has come to feel like disrespecting people's
past experiences and their lack of time.  Sonkei will try a different
approach.  There is only one rule: Respect.  If you prefer communication
by hieroglyphs written on clay stones, we will respect that and might
even participate.  But you will also have to respect if we don't.  We
will also expect you to be willing to learn both technically and
methodologically as we won't tolerate you being disrespectful to the one
trying to help you.  We do promise to 1) try and support you as much as
possible as our free time permits and 2) try and lower the (technical)
bar so everybody can bring to the community what they have to offer.

The main difference will be in how you can expect to be treated (and are
expected to treat others) in the Sonkei community.

Regards

Rolf