[arch-dev-public] SCM branch plans [was: Killing CVS]

[Andreas Radke]

Am Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:03:34 -0500
schrieb "Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:

> Well. Erm, no offense or anything, but why are you trying to plan
> Archlinux to support your side project? It's fine and all, but a few
> things you've said regarding the repo design are assuming you're going
> to be using gerolde to run your custom distribution as well. 

Why do you call it a custom distribution or a side project? The
intention was to prepare something good in mind we could offer later
officially. No serious work has been done so far.

Right now I only want to say we should keep the option to maintain
something more than what Arch is now. We should have an eye on that
when switching away from cvs.

> I'll make you a deal. You help us with the CPU and IO load on gerolde,
> and we can look into supporting your project as well. Until then,
> though, it's just not feasible - too much load on this single machine
> will make BOTH projects look bad.

No problem. I think it wouldn't be that hard to get another system
sponsored by our community once we can offer one more product they
like. Remember the last donation round. For playing like we did it in
the past with Arch64 a private server or one of the local community
servers (hey greetings to archlinux.de!) should be enough.

> The above applies here as well, BUT, I wanted to know where this was
> being discussed. If pacman was ported to BSD, I've never seen, nor
> heard of, patches for it. This would be valuable information for us.
> Not only would it save us work, but Dan is doing this _right now_.

Hm. Jan could menage to compile pacman 3.0.x on a FreeBSD 7.x
prerelease within one evening. In our forum was an old thread about a
ported pacman 2.x version.

We haven't seen any serious attempt on porting pacman over last two
years or any other new architecture port. Also afaik no answer to the
PackageKit threads from the pacman devs. And we had issues with md5sums
calculating always giving segfaults. Why do you want to integrate
portability code (that was there in the past) back again if you are
unsure to support it? Our work so far seems lost due to Jan's broken
notebook. But we were talking to try it again when FreeBSD7 comes into
its final testing state where it right now goes.

> Why is this all so cloak and dagger? I think many of us would love to
> participate in discussions like this, but it seems like it's all
> behind the scenes and hush-hush. Is there any reason this couldn't be
> brought up publicly?

Most developers seem to be busy with work and only have few time to
work on certain Arch projects. These projects grow very slowly. I
remember some discussion about the kernel 2.6.16 as a stable
alternative in extra. We had more stability related discussions in
meetings and mailing list threads in the past.

Jan and me were only thinking loud about those project together
with some devs at Linuxtag and FrosCon. A few kept working and talking
on that from time to time looking for a new task/challenge. 

Doing massive packaging work for both architectures over a long period
I was in the expection to give other devs the freedom to speedup the
coding of a good package building architecture. At least something that
would take load of us. But nothing important has changed. So it's not
the time to discuss another big plus of workload that early. 

These are just plans for future projects I'd like to see later
officially around Arch.

Andy