Discuss list

[Christian Haugan Toldnes]

Kyle Bresin wrote:
> 
> Still here.
> 
> I love my trustix 2.2 installs, and by the list of updates that keep 
> popping up in swup, it is definitely being supported to suit my needs.

Seems to me that's the only part Nived (the sole TSL developer) really 
has time to do. And since 2.2 is the current stable version of TSL 
(since November 8. 2004), he has no choice. The 3.1 release should have 
been released 6 months after 3.0, which would have been January 2006.

However, in Jan-06 I had my last month of employment with Comodo. Before 
that Erlend found himself a new job, and so did Oystein. And with my 
departure, all that was left was three fairly fresh Trustix developers: 
Nived, Bipin, and Ajith, in India. As far as I can see, only Nived has 
been working on TSL for the last year or so.

Just to clarify:
Erlend Midttun was THE original developer of TSL.
Oystein Viggen joint the team at a very early stage, I'm guessing 
somewhere at the time of TSL 1.1.
I joined the team in October 2001, just after TSL 1.5 was released in 
August.
After that, a lot of community work was done to make 2.0 a reality. I'm 
totally scared to mention names, as I don't want to forget anyone, and I 
grateful and respectful of these guys. Anyway... you'll find their names 
in the announcement:
http://www.trustix.net/doc/history/2.0-announce.txt

Take a look at the names, and try to find any of them on tsl-discuss the 
last couple of years. You'll find Danny, but not saying anything that 
can be interpreted as positive towards TSL. :)


> But as others mentioned, I had a lot of problems getting trustix 3.0.x 
> working.  And, it's not apparent to me, from this list, that a lot has 
> happened with trustix 3.0 in the last 2 years.  Maybe that's an 
> inaccurate impression, but it's the one I currently have.

There has been updates to 3.0, as there should be. However, 3.0.5 has 
taken a long time. Not to blame Nived. Being only 1 developer on a 
distribution is very challenging.

The main difference between 3.0 and 3.0.5 is the re-introduction of 
Anaconda as the installer, instead of Viper, which was introduced in 3.0.

The main reason for developing Viper was that the Comodo management 
wanted Trustix to differentiate itself from other distributions, in a 
more visible way. No real technical reasons, although we managed to come 
up with a few, to keep the effort interesting for everyone involved. 
People need to rationalize, you know.. ;)

The only reason for reintroducing Anaconda in 3.0.5 was that everyone 
that developed the closed-source Viper installer, was by then fired.

The main problem with TSL is not that it's vulnerable to whatever the 
Comodo management decides, although this is also true. The main problem 
is that it's a distribution developed by one person, with an active 
community of about 15 people, and an ever changing user mass.

We, the original TSL developers, measured the download rate of 2.2 and 
3.0 before we left the sinking ship in late 2005/early 2006. The amazing 
thing about the results was not the great amount of downloads each 
month. The interesting part was WHO downloaded TSL.

What we found was that of the ~3000 ISO downloads each month, about 90% 
never downloaded swup updates. About 95% never downloaded the iso more 
than once. Which mean that either:
1) Only a very small minority of the people that tested TSL actually 
ended up using it.

2) The vast majority of downloaders had their IP address dynamically 
changed via DHCP, hardly the choice of IT professionals.

If you include the stats for the tsl-discuss mailing lists, 
(http://christht.tihlde.org/tsl-discuss-stats-2.txt) you find that the 
activity of the community has gone down from an average of ~400 postings 
each month in late 2003 and early 2004, to an average of ~60 postings 
from late 2006 to present day. That's a significant reduction.

So the only real answer to Ariëns question is:
No, almost nobody is still reading tsl-discuss, and yes, the vast 
majority of the community has moved away to other distributions.


Thank you for reading this, and both Ubuntu and CentOS are decent 
alternatives to TSL.

c