[K12OSN] perhaps a radical idea

[Quentin Hartman <qhartman lane k12 or us>]

Colleagues-
	I've been tossing this idea around in my head for awhile now, and it
seems it has become time to present it to the rest of you. With the
demise of RHL as we know it, the complexities of relying so heavily on
an upstream commercial distro to tightly integrate K12LTSP into has
become apparent to many of us.
	Rather than moving to RHEL or WBEL (which in turn relies on a
commercial upstream distro) is it time to start exploring other distros,
preferably a community-oriented one? Maybe Debian? I mean, we're all
using apt-get on our boxes anyway, so this would provide a pretty
shallow learning curve for some of the most common tasks, and many of
the others will be fundamentally the same. I know that fedora is
technically community driven and would seem to provide an easier
transition path in the short term, but since it is a fledgling system,
there have been a lot of unanswered questions about just how stable it
is going to be, whereas Debian has proven to be a Rock, for many years.
I've seen these questions raised here and elsewhere.
	My personal favorite solution would be to try to divorce the K12LTSP
system from any particular distro as much as possible by turning it into
a set of customizable scripts that could be tweaked to take into account
a variety of distros. I realize that this would be a pretty large
undertaking and there are a lot of downsides to this, the most obvious
one being the potential to fracture the little sub-community we have
built up here, but I think that's surmountable. A look through the
archives proves that K12LTSP is not the only thing this group is about.
 	For example, I've been playing with making a K12LTSP ebuild for my
distro of choice, Gentoo. I haven't put a whole bunch of time into it,
but it seems doable, so once my universe settles down a bit, I am going
to tackle it more seriously.
	So I guess this post boils down to three points:

1- Should other distros be considered now as a platform for K12LTSP?
2- Should K12LTSP keep going as a "distro" like it is now, or would it
be simpler *in the long term* to divorce from any particular distro?
3- Any other Gentoo odd-balls out there want to help me make an Ebuild
for K12LTSP? ;)

I realize that these may very well no be popular suggestions, but I
think they are things that should at least be discussed, and I
personally would be willing put time into seeing some of them happen.
  
-- 
-Just food for Thought-

-Quentin Hartman-

Academic Computing and Networking Services Coordinator
Fern Ridge School District 28J
Elmira, OR
Office: 541-935-2253 x429
Cell: 541-914-2989
qhartman lane k12 or us
www.fernridge.k12.or.us