Hi all. Nice to see some familiar faces post.



I must apologize first. I've been really busy lately and had totally forgotten about this thread. It's nice to see that we still have some interest on the project.



Seems I am not alone in that a change of circumstances has rendered me unable to contribute to this project as much as I used to.



These days i'm pretty busy with my RL and $work and just dont have the time or energy to head anything like this. As I have said in the past, I do have a bit of time to make smaller contributions, but someone else needs to play captain.



If anyone is willing to take the reigns, I'd be willing to re-build the infrastructure and setup the services that were lost in the last data disaster. This will require some time since it has to be done from scratch again. The original setup and configs were lost.



I believe with the help of those services, some of the daunting and time-consuming tasks are eliminated and efforts can be focused on the actual product.



As for direction of the project, I can only offer an opinion, but not much else. At least not for a while.



I think most would agree that the linux desktop has evolved a lot. On the surface you may not notice much, but under the hood, things are much different than they were 5 years ago, not to mention 10.



One of the biggest drivers behind that change is systemd. We are at the point where it's almost impossible to build a relevant linux without some systemd component. Systemd is now entangled into places you would never expect to see it. From the init system, to network, to DNS name resolving, to desktop interfaces, and from what I read in recent days, there is even plans for a systemd-homed, which is supposed to take over some aspects of /home particularly for laptops for encryption and what not.



The point is that these days, it is almost inevitable to have at least some systemd library living if not fully operating on your box. This also means that there are lots and lots of things that will require some systemd component to compile.



All of that before we even get to the bootloader, EFI, multi-lib, arch support, etc.



In my opinion, that leaves us with 3 options.



1) Re-build the project with a limited scope of target installs. This would appeal to old hardware and will require effort to keep systemd off the system ( again, will be nearly impossible )



2) Jump on the wagon and make software that works. This means installing systemd so that software that wants it can access it.



3) Crawl back under somebody else's umbrella ( ie, slack ) and create a spin instead of our own product.



IMHO, all of these options offer as many disadvantages as they do advantages.



I agree that it would be a shame to see the resources dedicated to VL go to waste. I'm not opposed to either of the 3 options I laid out before, like I said, I just need somebody to take the lead and point in a (any) direction.



I should be able to contribute small fixes, packages, infrastructure services and their maintenance, but I cannot build the product itself from scratch myself or make decisions as to which way to go on any issue. I dont have the time or mental/emotional energy to objectively weigh each issue and decide one way or the other.



Once again, it was good to hear from everybody. Will try to remain in touch here, and i'm always accessible as usual on freenode.

