Hello, I am the GetDeb project founder and manager, I would like to present GetDeb, current status and planned goals.
Introduction --------------- The GetDeb idea born about 1 year ago, the motivation came from forums participation, where it was very common to find end users struggling to build some software on their systems, or just asking for help on broken systems after trying to use incompatible repositories. I did some research on the processes to get a software updated or introduced into Ubuntu at that time, they were complex, developers (not users) oriented and with requirements that could not be covered by a significant part of the software packaging requests. Policy and Methodology ------------------------------ We provide packages only for the "current" Ubuntu distribution release, our updates are upstream based, the opposite of the Ubuntu Stable Update Release policy, we take the latest upstream update as the most stable and apply the packaging and/or Debian/Ubuntu integration specific patches, when available we use Debian/Ubuntu or 3rd parties merging work. Package updates which depend on library updates that may interfere with other main/universe packages are NOT provided. Current Status ------------------- After 1 year of existence the project turned from a 1 person spare time package building, web development and, the most important task, users feedback handling to a small team work project with occasional but very important third party contributers. On a daily basis we provide an average of >5K .deb packages, 100 GBs distributed over about 10 mirrors. We have > 7K registered users (the only features available on registration is the ability to comment releases and get site news). One of our important accessibility factors is internationalization, 99% of the site template is translatable and already translated into more than 20 languages. The applications description is also translatable, however that is still a young and not very polished feature, at this moment we have about 1K application descriptions translated to random languages. Despite of our short existence we are listed on the first page of google searches for Ubuntu software, which we observe as a good popularity indication. Financial ----------- Our work is volunteer mostly free time work, we have no business financial goals, we do accept financial support, mostly for material acquisition. Our automated build system server is about to become paid (500 Euros) from paypal donations. The web site hosting costs are covered with the google adsense income. The download traffic is covered by the entities which are supporting us with mirrors. Future Plans --------------- Move to APT based software distribution - Most people ask why aren't we using APT yet, the answer is simple, there is no APT based implementation for a project with our distribution model, there are some limitations that we still need to address Internationalization improvement - One of the current problems is the mix between english contents and local contents and contacts (this can be seen on the comments section) I have no specific mention to collaboration with the Ubuntu/Debian universe, backports, developers, packaging teams, that is our philosophy and practice, we belong to the same community. I will appreciate any questions/comments/suggestions. References -------------- The Site: http://www.getdeb.net/ Download stats: http://www.getdeb.net/graphs/release_all.php Internationalization: http://www.getdeb.net/languages.php Financial: http://www.getdeb.net/financial.php Building Process: http://wiki.getdeb.net/Package_Building Launchpad Project: https://launchpad.net/getdeb.net Best regards, -- João Pinto IRC: Lamego @ irc.freenode.net Jabber ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] GetDeb Project Manager - http://www.getdeb.net
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