I don't have much time to reply to the thread in detail, but I think some of
the concerns mentioned here are valid and deserve a response.
I've gone through some life changes recently, moving to the USA, getting
married, working for the FSF... I'm busier than I've ever been. I've
explained this in some other messages, and I've been trying to reserve some
of my time for the project, not as successfully as I (or the community) would
have liked. Recently I decided to dedicate my whole work day on Fridays to
Trisquel (unpaid, notice that the FSF does not pay me to work on Trisquel or
my contributions to GNU), throughout the summer. I started to do so a couple
weeks ago but I had to skip one due to a family emergency. Today I could
dedicate most of my day to Trisquel and fixed some problems with the repo
management that were preventing updates to be pushed. I also started to work
on fixing the bugs in the Firefox > Abrowser package helper that are
preventing new versions of the browser to be published.
After hearing the concerns of the community through threads like this and
directly through the IRC channel I will also make an effort to improve my
communications, by posting a progress update every week. I also take this
opportunity to remind people that I don't follow the forums directly (I
intervene when I'm pointed to a specific post) but I do check for direct
messages through the #trisquel and #trisquel-dev channels on irc.freenode.net
(as user quidam).
A brief update on recent progress:
- Trisquel 8 ("Flidas") repos have been populated, and I added the minimum
necessary custom packages to be able to debootstrap the system. This is the
first milestone for the T8 release.
- The scripts to generate the T8 kernel line are almost ready.
- Today I fixed issues in the repo management system caused by Ubuntu
decommissioning the repos for the 10.04 release. Note that we will keep the
Trisquel 4.0 repos in place for a bit longer since some legacy machines at
the FSF depend on them. Updates should be coming in normally now.
Pending important tasks that I will be working on in the following Fridays:
- Debugging the helpers that are failing to build, starting with the Firefox
one and following with others by security priority.
- Cleaning the merge request queue!
- Setting up the build jails for Trisquel 8
- Building the kernel and netinst image first
- Then move to the desktop related packages
- Release testing live images
Additionally, an important tasks that needs to be done is to set up an alert
system that checks for all automated services to work as expected. Due to the
big amount of automation involved in the maintenance of our packages (through
the helper system and continuous integration with Jenkins), we depend on
things running smoothly, or alert immediately so issues like the one I fixed
today don't have a chance to linger too much.
Thanks everybody for your patience, support and contributions!
