It's been quite a while since the last Goals mail so lots of exciting things have happened since then. Partly because of the timespan I've decided to reorganise this mail a bit compared to earlier editions, first listing some of the bigger things we've accomplished and then listing things we should be focusing on in the future. I hope this format shows our progress better and also helps focus a bit more on things to do.
Stuff implemented since last goals mail: I'm only going to mention some of the larger / more visible things here. There's lots of smaller things being done on a daily basis and overall I consider our progress quite good. * distfiles mirror - Kim Hansen (kimrhh) set up a distfiles mirror at http://distfiles.exherbo.org that's been working quite well so far. * Creandus - Creandus is replaced by built-in package manager support for installing users and groups. It works much like other packages in that you can define dependencies on users and groups. * Script for building virtual machine images - I've recently published my kvm image building script which allows everybody to build their own images instead of having to wait for me to update the official images. Work on the script continues and mostly thanks to the work of Sterling X. Winter it's much cleaner and much improved already. It should be fairly simple to add an ISO target to the script to build basic install CDs. * Webbased package browser - Ciaran implemted Summer, currently available on http://dev.exherbo.org/~ciaranm/summer/index.html. It should be moved to http://summer.exherbo.org soon. * New website - I took some time to clean up our website and reorganise things a bit. With the new design and architecture of the website I've also invited users to contribute documentation which quickly led to a simple i nstall guide and a short Exherbo FAQ, contributed by Jonathan Dahan. * Common documentation format - All our documentation should be in MarkDown format now (more precisely the Maruku variant). * Added license information wherever it was missing - Some of our documentation and scripts didn't have copyright and license information. This should be fixed now but please contact me if you spot any license problems. * Lots of package updates and additions - We're very quick to add new package versions to the repositories and patches from users are most often pushed at an incredible speed. We're now at a very respectable 1200+ packages and still growing fairly quickly. Goals or things that still need some work: * Multilib/arch/ABI/.. - Some tests was done but we still have some unresolved problems. Lots of interest in this subject so I'm quite hopeful that somebody is going to pick this up again. * Genesis - I've been doing lots of actual work on this and it's changed direction a fair bit because of that work. It's currently hosted in a private git repository but I'm hoping to open it a bit more in the near fu ture. Genesis is currently my main priority. * Killing categories - There's a half-baked plan for killing categories so that'll happen in due time. * Cleaning up arbor - Arbor is a somewhat special repository being our main repository and also the repository that base systems gets installed from. But being the main repository also means that lots of smaller packages ends u p in arbor when we have no better place to put them. From time to time it makes sense to clean up arbor a bit and move some of these packages out to topic repositories instead. Arkanoid recently started this process by mailing exherbo-dev with a list of packages that should be moved or at least deserves some consideration. * Better -scm handling (-...@id stuff) - Not done afaik. * Better autotools handling - I still like to take a look at the way we handle autotools and see if it can be improved. We've inherited a few odd things from Gentoo at least that I'm not particularly fond of. * Parts - Still just at the idea stage. We need to figure out if this should still be a goal. * Native support for CPAN, Gems and other similar package repositories - There's been a few discussions from time to time on how to handle various problems with upstream indexes. I believe the current idea is that it's possible to implement (in many cases at least) but some of the problems require upstream fixes or non-trivial hacks on our side (building our own index for example). * Sane way to build external kernel modules - This subject comes up from time to time. We need to specify the requirements before we can implement support for external kernel modules. * pkg_die - Would allow package specific "debug" information information when packages dies. - A good example is showing which opengl provider is currently selected when a package building against opengl dies. - This is still in the pipeline afaik. * New profiles structure / format - The current profiles are more or less direct copies of Gentoo profiles and doesn't suit our ideas very well. - One idea is mixins but we need to discuss profiles in more details before making any big changes. - Versioned profiles might be nice as well. * Replace sandbox - sys-apps/sandbox have a number of problems that's not easily solved. Ali Polatel (alip) has written a new sandbox implementation called Sydbox for use in Exherbo and I believe it's at a point where we can start testing it on real systems to get a bit wider testing. * RepositoryRepository - Some people don't like adding new repositories to their paludis configuration manually so we need to implement features for managing repositories through paludis. We've decided to do this by implementing RepositoryRepository which is going to be a repository describing the available repositories and letting users do things like: paludis --install repository/x11. Regards, Bryan Østergaard _______________________________________________ Exherbo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.exherbo.org/mailman/listinfo/exherbo-dev
