Quirky LTS?

As I am retired from Puppy Linux development, and despite the current flurry of activity developing Quirky, I will likely soon lapse back to other activities, so I am thinking of creating a "Long Term Supported" Quirky.

With Quirky, my fork of Puppy and venue for experimenting with new ideas, there have been releases that are very different from each other. Quite bewildering for anyone checking out Quirky for the first time.

The latest Quirky, Quirky Unicorn 6.2.1, built from Ubuntu 14.10 binary DEBs, is OK, except that I have graphics rendering issues with my Intel graphics chip, plus, as usual, I very much dislike the bloat.

One of my great loves with Puppy has been to create a very small distro, and I still enjoy that. Even though we have more RAM etc., there is still a place for a very small distro. Like, for example, running fast in RAM-only, with plenty of "leg room" to run apps and save stuff.

For that reason, I think that my favourite Quirky is 6.1.4, which is built from binary packages compiled in T2. The xz'ed image file was about 105MB, I recall.

My recent experience with Buildroot has shown me ways in which I might be able to make that smaller, and this is something that I would like to do.
Not using Buildroot though, as I need a tool that will create binary packages and a resultant root filesystem that has the complete compiler toolchain in it.

For this reason, I am looking at T2 again, employing what I have learned from Buildroot.

My thinking is that I will create something that I will stick with for a few years. This will also give others the opportunity to contribute, packages perhaps, knowing that this version of Quirky is going to be around for a considerable time.

This will mean then, that Quirky is going to settle down, become mature, not change wildly from one version to the next.

Quirky history
A bit of an overview of the Quirky releases, going back in time:

Quirky Unicorn (latest 6.2.1):
This is built from Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn DEBs. 6.2 release:
http://bkhome.org/news/201410/quirky-unicorn-62-released.html

Quirky Tahr (latest 6.0.5)
Built from Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr DEBs. 6.0 release:
http://bkhome.org/news/201401/quirky-tahr-60-released.html

Quirky T2 (latest 6.1.4)
Packages compiled from source using T2. The first release was 6.0:
http://bkhome.org/news/201312/quirky-60.html
But, version numbers grew to the latest, 6.1.4, which overlaps the later Trusty Tahr, so that is a source of confusion.

I think perhaps that my LTS Quirky will be version 6.3.x, to clearly show that it is later than all of the others.

If anyone wants to contribute a thought about this, feel free to post here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=90784&start=855

Tags: quirky, linux