[arch-dev-public] Status Report: 2007-11-05

[Eric Belanger]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Aaron Griffin wrote:

> ArchLinux Status Report, 2007-11-05
> ===================================
>   Aaron Griffin (Reviewed by Travis Willard)
>
> So, some of you may have noticed there was no Status Report last week. Well,
> see, I got busy. No one to blame but myself. I _was_ going to get it out on
> Tuesday, but decided to "roll with it", as it were.
>
> So, before we get started, I wanted to get some honest opinions - does doing
> this every 2 weeks make you guys feel less pestered?

Once per two weeks would be OK. It'll be less work for you and the amount 
of progress that we do on in a week is not significant enough 
to necessitate a weekly SR.

> * The dividing line: extra and community
>
> Another discussion that has gone by the wayside.  I'll try to summarize here to
> see if we can a better idea.
>
> The question: when does a package belong in extra?
>
> We all agree that we need some sort of "rule" for this. There seems to be two
> big ideas on how to "answer" this question:
>
> a) Split extra into "mantle" and "crust". Mantle contains packages "important to
> the distro" to be agreed upon by the developers, and crust contains anything
> else a developer wants to maintain.
>
> b) The idea above remains the same, BUT extra is not split at all. The "mantle"
> packages go to extra, and "crust" packages go to community.
>
> So, what do you guys think? Should we vote on these two to get things moving?
>

Neither a) nor b) answers that question.

Option a) simply changes the question "What should go in extra and what 
should go in community?" to "What should go in mantle and what should go 
in crust?". We''l ned to define what we maen by important at one point and 
I see a lot of possible bikeshed painting in getting that definition and 
in the repo splitup afterward.

Option b) is the stau quo. We're simply renaming the repo. Not a big 
improvement.

I might be overlooking something though.  BTW, I don't think the names of 
mantle and crust are appropriate for a general distro like Arch. They 
would be perfect for a distro targeted to geophysicists or Earth science 
users though.  But that's a minor detail that can be discussed later if 
we decide to go forward with the renaming/splitup.


> * Package and Orphan Cleanup
>
> Eric has done an amazing job of cleaning up a big wave of packages from extra.
> All things considered, this is fairly important task, as is affects the
> "Dividing line" question above, as well as lightening our workload.
>
> Eric, what is the next step here - how can we help?
>

It would be nice if people would take time to go over the orphans to be 
removed list (https://www.archlinux.org/wiki/Repo%20Cleanup/) and add 
reason to remove or keep packages or any comment/concerns.  There is a lot 
of packages that I don't know what their use is or wether an alternative 
exist in the repo.  So I won't be able to fill everything out.

Depending on how the filling goes, sometime this week, I'll either submit 
a second sublist on the ML for discussion/revision or submit the rest of 
removable orphans.

Also, as a reminder, there is an important list of orphans that must 
remain in extra because they are depencies of packages which have a 
maintainer (2nd large table in wiki). Andy has done a lot of work to 
figure out what packages depends on these orphans and who are their 
maintainer. I don't know yet exactly how we'll distribute/assign these 
orphans as some of you might have already an important workload but 
ideally everyone should also adopt the orphans that are dependencies of 
their packages. I encourage you to give a look at that list also.

IMPORTANT: If you adopt an orphan or notice that one of these orphans has 
been adopted, please remove it from the list or let me know so I can 
remove it.  That will remove any unnecessary checking.

>
> == Pending Tasks, Long Term ==
>
> * Perl policy
>
> I've moved this one to the long-term section
>
> http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8374
>
> Apparently, perl isn't very widely cared about, so this is mostly all up to me,
> and we all know my freetime is hard to find these days. So, this is on the "hey
> this is important" list, but there is no rush.
>

I've done quite a lot of perl related work  in community repo so I won't 
mind helping with  that in extra. That'll be after the cleanup though. ;)


Eric

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