Re: [GNU-linux-libre] review of uruk

[bill-auger]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:57:44 +0200 Denis wrote:
> > the point of the 2018 changes and the "brief final review", was
> > that the community would do all of the difficult and
> > time-consuming work - the FSF only needs to read the mailing
> > list messages, and can largely trust the reviewers findings
> > the FSF's role needs to be no more than to double-check what
> > the "application manager" has documented  
> The issue here may be precisely the amount of work needed to do this
> double-check.

i could give two points of reference - pureos and hyperbola were
fully reviewed and endorsed within a few (2-3) months - you made
the argument that hyperbola was easier, because it was a fork of
an already-endorsed distro - but pureos was not - if that was a
factor, i would expect that pureos would have taken much longer
than hyperbola, for that reason alone - there was obviously much
more to double-check

also, the hyperbola review took place after the change which
relieved most of the work from the FSF - the brief final review
was all that the FSF needed to do for hyperbola - that makes two
factors which should have made the pureos process much longer -
but it was not

there is probably a third factor also - hyperbola's package
selection is much more modest than the average distro - it has
many fewer bloated GUI applications (eg: no desktop suites such
as GNOME, KDE, etc), which is where the majority of freedom and
privacy problems are found

to me, that suggests that either the double-checking is not very
demanding, or that the FSF was watching the pureos process unfold
(reading the mailing list), or was involved directly all along,
and so a secondary double-checking phase was not needed

either way, it suggest that a review (if without delays) takes
less than 3 months, regardless of the distro, or the portion of
the workload done by the FSF