2007/5/9, Alessandro Calorì <axelgenus@gmail.com>:
2007/5/9, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de>:
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.
I didn't imagine you were just two guys keeping up this work. How could you manage all that work (and in such a good way)?
While speaking about man-power: are there some capable users willing to maintain x86_64 packages? Andy, if you know such people that are willing to become devs - please bring them on. I'm sure devs will vote for them. Also, will JGC be maintaining x86_64 of Gnome now? What's the status of pacbuild? That would help much too.
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.
That's a hard task to achieve because becoming a TU is really hard (Arch user from three months, keeping up packages on AUR for a long time...).
Is it? AFAIR there were no candidate voted down. To become TU you need only to post short introduction message to tur-users ML. The procedure of becoming a TU is not that hard, really (though, I must confess I was a bit scary to write my introduction :-) ) BTW, what's your AUR login?
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.
This would not respect the "Arch way" to be a bleeding edge distro...
That could be also archieved by offloading many uncommon packages to Community repo. Yeah, that will require more TUs, but they are easier to find, especially when we will do a good announcement (so to reduce the fear to be rejected). On the other hand it would be very good if some existent TUs become devs (and give out their packages and switched to maintaining official repos only, to reduce workload).
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.
In this case the differences from the i686 distro would increase, making the development more "chaotic"...
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.
That's exactly what we have right now!
The stable and extra repositories should contain only "stable" packages but in Arch the term "stable" assume a custom meaning: packages that compile, don't block and don't give major troubles using them. An example: GNOME and Esound daemon, considered "stable" either for i686 or x86-64, don't work togheter because ESD locks up gnome-panel during start-up (you need to manually restart the service to unlock it); in many other distros this is not considerable "stable".
Agree. (even though ESD + Gnome always worked fine to me)
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.
I agree.
Everybody who wants to help out or has something to say may post here or contact me on one of my instant messenger accounts you find in the forum.
I would like to help (again) either in Arch project or out of it. If you need, just tell me where and when! ;)
I didn't understand what you meant here, Andy (about distro). -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)