There has been a lot of discussion on this list over the last few months. The community is definitely growing and we're happy to see people helping people use the software.
With more use comes more feature requests and bug reports. This is generally a good thing, but it can be frustrating. A few mailing-list interactions over the past few weeks have ended with a "That's fixed in the next release" or "That feature is coming in Glendale" message. That answer inevitably leads to a "What's Glendale and when will it be here?" question. Vyatta's next release is code named "Glendale" (after a city in California, which is where we currently get all our release names). Glendale is the code base that will eventually become VC4. In the history of Vyatta, there have been three large epochs: The first epoch was the 1.0 through 1.0.3 releases. In this epoch, the system was a custom version of Linux. It was very inflexible and adding a package to the system meant rebuilding the whole system from scratch. While the Debian package format was used as a format, all packages in the system were incompatible with standard Debian package dependencies. The second epoch started with 1.1. In release 1.1, we reworked the system completely to base it on standard Debian and to be compatible with Debian package dependencies. This meant it was now possible to get a package from a standard Debian repository and add it to the system and apt would know how to do all the right things with installing dependent packages. With the start of VC2, we broke the release trains into separate Community and Supported systems, based on each other, but not necessarily the same. On the Community side of things, VC2 through VC3 are part of the second epoch. On the subscription side of things, releases from 2.0 through 2.3 are part of the second epoch. Glendale represents the start of the third epoch. The goals for Glendale were to: 1. Make the system even more open and extensible. 2. Improve the scalability and performance of the system to address new markets. 3. Add in a bunch of features that everybody wanted, some of which had been blocked by fundamental architectural issues that needed to be removed. 4. Fix a whole lot of bugs. We believe we are well on our way to achieving all that. While I won't go into a lot of detail right here, you can expect the following major changes in Glendale: 1. The routing subsystem has been overhauled. The feature set has improved dramatically and the stability and performance have increased. 2. The CLI has been completely overhauled. On the surface, you'll find that it looks the same and has the same flavor of past releases, but the functionality is greatly increased along with the ease of adding new features going forward. 3. We have added a bunch of new features. Many of these were top-requested features on the Top Enhancements Community wiki page. A high-level enhancements include: * DHCP client * QoS * VPN remote client support * PPPoE * GRE encapsulation * Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) routing * WAN Load Balancing * A new installer to replace the install-system script There are other enhancements at all levels of the system below the major feature level. The next step is for you, the Vyatta community, to get involved in the development and testing process. We're interested in your feedback, opinions, and comments. In order to get you convenient access to the system, we're going to make three pre-release builds available in ISO CD-ROM format on the following schedule: * Alpha 1: January 2008 * Alpha 2: February 2008 * Beta: March 2008 * Release: April 2008 We are preparing Alpha 1 even as we speak and I should be able to announce its arrival later this week or early next week. At that time, I'll give you a lot more detail about what has changed in the release, what to expect in terms of rough edges and incomplete functionality. Not everything will be in the system in the early alphas, and many things that are present will have major issues. Each release will try to identify the landmines to help you avoid them. We're all looking forward to this release. Glendale represents a quantum leap forward in the Vyatta system and is the foundation for many improvements we have on the drawing board. If you're at all interested in the Vyatta system, you'll want to download the Alphas and start investigating the changes. As I said, I'll have more detail in a few days. Until then... Cheers, -- Dave Roberts Vyatta Cruise Director _______________________________________________ Vyatta-users mailing list Vyatta-users@mailman.vyatta.com http://mailman.vyatta.com/mailman/listinfo/vyatta-users