On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Allan McRae wrote:

I am giving an hour long talk at the end of next week about Arch, how it works and why we are successful. I will focus on stuff I am involved with (i.e. pacman...), but will give examples of things like how we decided on systemd, the new installer, etc. (other suggestions welcome)

I'm doing a similar thing in Paris at the beginning of April, so I'll be asking Allan for whatever off-list feedback you give so I can steal it :)

Finally, if you are in Lisbon on the 1st of March, come see me! Search for "SINFO XX" for details.

Also, if anyone are in Paris on the fourth and fifth of April, please come say hi (I'll post a link once the conference is announced). Cheers, Tom

[2013-02-20 00:15:40 +1000] Allan McRae:

One thing I would like to talk about is our interaction with upstream. I know a few of us have commit access to various upstream projects, or have regularly contributed patches, or have upstream bug tracker privileges etc. Could people let me know about these things so I can make a summary.

I've sent quite a few patches upstream; probably half of them are of the type "porting foo to libbar-2's API" - we aren't on the bleeding edge for nothing. I haven't done a lot besides that, and try more and more to get users to interact with upstream themselves. In fact, I see KISS packaging as a way of cutting the middle man (me): make packages so straightforward and minimalistic that all user complaints can be forwarded as-is upstream. A package for which this has been taken to the next level is audacious: upstream follows our bug tracker and, usually, by the time I get assigned a new bug report, they have already worked out what the problem is (sometimes with the help of the reporter) and released a new version fixing it. So I'm just closing bug reports and packaging new versions... I'm sure that also applies to tons of other packages in our repos.

Something else I was specifically asked to cover is future plans for Arch. Does anyone have things beyond updating packages they want to do?

Only what I've mentioned on the mailing list in the past - but unfortunately haven't had enough time to bring further since: - merge with Arch ARM. - build packages in VM (works like a charm for i686/x86_64, that's how I've been building stuff [instead of chroots] for the past many months, but I haven't gotten around adapting it to allow ARM VMs yet). Cheers and enjoy the trip/conference! -- Gaetan

On 20/02/13 00:15, Allan McRae wrote:

Hi,

I am giving an hour long talk at the end of next week about Arch, how it works and why we are successful. I will focus on stuff I am involved with (i.e. pacman...), but will give examples of things like how we decided on systemd, the new installer, etc. (other suggestions welcome)

One thing I would like to talk about is our interaction with upstream. I know a few of us have commit access to various upstream projects, or have regularly contributed patches, or have upstream bug tracker privileges etc. Could people let me know about these things so I can make a summary.

Something else I was specifically asked to cover is future plans for Arch. Does anyone have things beyond updating packages they want to do?

Finally, if you are in Lisbon on the 1st of March, come see me! Search for "SINFO XX" for details.

Allan

P.S. Please reply off list to avoid irrelevant noise and we don't want to spoil my talk! I believe the talk will be posted on youtube and I will make my slides available too.

Any further responses to this? I had (maybe not so...) surprisingly few so far. Allan