On 5/9/07, Andreas Radke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > congratulation. we have won! > > our gcc-gcj is broken due to a major feature addon the developer made > right before he orphaned it. we (Hussam who does i686 rc packages and > me) are no more able to build OpenOffice.org standing a few days before > the 2.2.1 release candidate. this is not to blaim that developer but for > any other developer and all users not using the testing repo. > > but this is only the peak of all the chaotic "development" as we call > it. untill now we used have one ArchLinux tree now having two > architectures officially supported (i686+x86_64) based on simplicity and > pacman repo manager as its basic parts. Having the latest stable package > version was the goal. we have put more and more packages into the > current+extra repos. important packages we want to test for a while in > our "testing" repos. sadly it's not worth the name. almost nobody uses > it. even not all developers as highly recommended. continously we put > packages with major issues into the stable repos. > > we from the x86_64 port are only 2 guys rebuilding and maintaining > ~2500 packages. we have not the power and possebility to change > anything important. > > from my point of view we have passed a point where this concept won't > work anymore. we have a poor developement infrastructure compared to > other distributions. we slow down our package release process due to > many developers beeing busy with other things (real life and more). but > then we force us to push things very quickly into the repos to satisfy > our own old goals. > > well. not more with me beeing responsible for the Arch x86_64 port. > > some ways are possible: > > 1) improve the infrastructure and increase the manpower of developers > and packagers for all supported dramatically. we are trying that for > over a year now without any noticable real success.
agreed. there's a lot of talk on that (and I cringe every time i say that, because I add to it) but it's only now that people are doing, stuff. > 2) dramatically lower the work(=less binary packages) for the devs to > give them time for making packages of a better quality. doubt came up > as Arch should remain a supported binary distribution in most parts. i think [extra] needs a solid culling. There's a lot of packages there with negligable audience. [community] is worse. > 3) new goals for ArchLinux: accept to have not well tested packages > when we want to keep the update speed or accept a lower speed on update > to get new packages better tested. > > 4) split the goals we have! let's have one more conservative stable > rolling rellease tree for higher quality and one on the bleading edge > front accepting it might break sometime. we dont have any goals. Look around on the website, wiki, everywhere. This is something we MUST define, otherwise we're blindly bumbling around. > there is only one working other distribution based on pacman out > claiming having a stable tree. I've talked to several devs and users > and they can imagine that a stable distribution by ArchLinux can become > a successor. that'd be cool. Unstable sucks. > I'm going to start a new project based on what we now call ArchLinux > for a new more stable but easy to maintain distribution. I would like to > do this for ArchLinux. But I have also no problem if you totally dislike > that and say it's a NoGo under the name of ArchLinux. if you implement the architecture, package it all up, prove it works, that'd be cool. Going as far as a releasing a whole new distro, not so. I think it's overkill to prove a point. Right now im screaming, WE NEED A WHITEBOARD. It'd be so awesome if we could meet in one room and work on this, an Arch hackathon. With a massive whiteboard. James -- iphitus // Arch Developer // iphitus.loudas.com _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
