Foresight Linux

» see foresightlinux.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Foresight Linux existed to answer one question. What does a desktop look like if it runs the newest GNOME on the day GNOME ships it? Ken VanDine started it while working on the GNOME marketing team, and the homepage in March 2005 was already making the pitch in plain words: Foresight carries the things that are not mature enough for the other distributions yet. Beagle and F-Spot were two of the examples it listed.

The machinery underneath is the part worth remembering. Foresight was built on rPath and used Conary, a package manager that updated the individual files inside a package rather than swapping the whole package out. For a rolling-release distribution that pulled changes constantly, that is the difference between a background trickle and a download you plan your evening around. On a Turkish ADSL line in 2007 it was not a theoretical advantage, and it is a large part of why a distribution that updated daily was usable at all on a slow connection.

The middle years were good ones. Foresight 2 brought 64-bit support and a graphical package manager through PackageKit, and Ars Technica handed it the 2008 Ovatio for distribution of the year. Shuttle Inc. signed on as an OEM partner and sponsored a community packaging contest, paying out KPC machines to whoever ported the most applications forward from the 1.x line. The contest was supposed to run a month and got extended to two because people were still finishing packages.

~ the record ~

~ the slowdown nobody announced ~

The release record tells the story without anyone having to write it down. DistroWatch lists 1.3 in May 2007 and then a cluster through 2008 and 2009. Next comes 2.5.0 in March 2011, after three alphas and a release candidate. After that there is exactly one more entry: 2.5.3 on 12 April 2013. A distribution whose whole selling point was getting to the newest desktop first went two years without cutting an image.

Nothing broke publicly in those two years. The repositories stayed up and a small number of people kept packaging things. What had gone was the volume of work that makes a distribution feel like a distribution instead of a repository somebody still has the password to.

~ the retirement email ~

Michael K. Johnson wrote on behalf of the Foresight Linux Council at 20:32 Eastern on 11 May 2015, which is half past midnight UTC on the twelfth. The council had determined that there had been insufficient volunteer activity to sustain meaningful new development of Foresight Linux. LWN and Softpedia both carried it that day.

The rest of the message was housekeeping. The repositories and the mailing lists would go offline around the end of May, and the JIRA and Confluence servers went with them. Anyone who wanted to keep a read-only copy of the archives was invited to say so on the development list. No calendar date was ever given for the switch-off, which is why the announcement is the date on this stone rather than the shutdown.

~ what answers today ~

foresightlinux.org still resolves and still answers, with a 403. That is a bot wall rather than a corpse, so it proves only that something is listening on port 443 eleven years after the council gave up. DistroWatch carries the plain version in one word: discontinued.

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