[cut-team] CUT status / plans

[Andrew Wood]

Hi

Im interested in the long term plan for CUT and where the progress is 
upto as I think its an essential project for Debian on the desktop and 
all Debian derived distros on the desktop also.

For derived distros currently we have Ubuntu and its derivitives (eg 
Mint) which are based on unstable and thus full of bugs and 'alpha' 
quality.  Or we've got Mint Debian Edition which is not a great deal 
better - being based on testing things still break in an ugly way.

On the 'pure' Debian side we can run testing and suffer similar issues 
when applying updates or we can use stable which is rock solid and 
outstanding quality but suffers from outdated library versions which can 
be a pain when trying to run/build newer apps.

There seems to be a clear need for something in the middle.

Stable will always be the choice for servers and desktops where a long 
term stable platform is needed but for the majority of desktop users a 
rolling distro with the same quality as stable but with more regularly 
updated versions is a must.

How much support does the CUT concept have in the Debian world? Are the 
majority in favour? How are things progressing with actually producing a 
rolling distro with stable-like quality but testing-like update frequency?

I'd be interested in helping out if I can. Ive got plenty of time to 
devote to it its just a question of what Im capable of doing. Still 
getting my head round producing debs but Ive been a Linux programmer for 
several years and could do quality control / integration testing etc or 
even packaging if I had a mentor :)

Let me explain where Im coming from:  I started with Red Hat Linux (in 
the days when it was still called that) then inevitably went to fedora 
and started to get annoyed by its (lack of) quality.  Moved to Ubuntu, 
used that for several years and started to get frustrated by its lack of 
quality. Tried Mint and found that because its based on Ubuntu it 
suffers from the same problems although its much better looking. Thought 
LMDE might be the solution but have had nasty experiences during package 
updates due to it being based on testing.

Think the future for consumer Linux iss probably something like LMDE but 
based on CUT and am keen to help make it happen.

Regards
Andrew