Judd Vinet wrote:
Hello All,
I've been receiving a few constructive complaints about the apparent lack
of progress within the official areas of Arch development.
Now, we revisit this subject about once every six months, and anyone
that relies heavily on open-source has probably been faced with similar
frustrations, either as an open-source producer or a consumer.
Let me allay any concerns -- Arch moves on, as always. But currently we've
been bogged down by some large package updates, so the majority of our
efforts have been poured into the Testing repository. Normally you'd see
this effort appear in Current/Extra instead, where it would be
publicly noticed.
To try and keep everyone on the same page, here's a little list of the main
projects we need to do, and a tentative ordering of them.
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1. We have a list of 600 packages that need to be rebuilt as part of the
gcc4/libtool-slay projects. We have about 80% of them finished. The
big move may occur as soon as this Saturday.
2. We need to release soon. There are some other improvements we really
want to have ready for 0.8, so a new plan has been proposed. Instead of
releasing a 0.8 soon, we would release a 0.7.1 that has the (almost) same
installation as 0.7, but with an updated package set. This will give us
time to work on the installer for 0.8.
3. Xorg modularization, by JGC.
Xorg 7.0 is switching to autotooled libraries, splitting up each and
every library they have. This makes parts of Xorg easier maintainable
and makes xorg development easier for people who want to contribute.
When you want to contribute something nowadays it's nearly impossible
without spending two full days investigating the Imake buildsystem.
4. OpenSSL 0.9.8 is out, and we have to rebuild all packages that link to
it.
5. QT4 needs to be packaged. Tpowa is proposing a side-by-side approach
with QT3 and QT4, as some apps will not build with QT4.
6. Combine kernel26 and kernel26-scsi into one initrd-driven kernel. This
would be really nice for everyone to have -- I'd like to have this ready
by 0.8.
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In an attempt to keep Arch development activity more visible, we were
thinking of setting up a development Arch blog. This blog would be
admin'ed by official developers, but anyone involved in Arch development
would be able to post to it. Basically, we want a way to aggregate all
Arch progress in one place.
The frontpage isn't the best, as that should be reserved for important
announcements and tricky/weird package upgrades. The dev blog would be
updated much more frequently. For example, a TU may post about his latest
triumph in getting package X and Y to build with package Z, or whatever.
Developers can post status updates about large/unruly projects like
libtoolslay, or just one of those "i'm still alive but busy" posts that
are so frequent (we devs are popular people in real life, dontcha know).
Now, I know this is yet another web service, and it may not get used and
it may just add yet another place to confuse the newbie. Let me know if
you feel this is the case.
Another point to bring up is Planet Arch. The Planet is an RSS aggregator
for some developer blogs. The one issue with the Planet is that it
aggregates ALL posts from our personal blogs, not just Arch-related ones.
A second point is that all Arch devs (official and un-) may not have
personal blogs to use, so they will need an Arch-hosted one.
As a "workaround" for people that use and like the Planet, we can feed all
the dev blog entries directly into the Planet, so you can still read your
juicy Arch tidbits from there, if you so desire.
Please share your thoughts, and let's keep it constructive. Constructive
is fun! :)
- J
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Many thanks for this, Judd. I also think the developer blog is a great
idea and I hope it catches on :)
Phil
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