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

[Aaron Griffin]

On 10/23/07, Andreas Radke <a.radke at arcor.de> wrote:
> 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.

The way I read it, I thought you HAD work done, and WERE working on
it, and just wanted to moves things over to gerolde.
Either way, I wouldn't feel comfortable just saying "hey lets start
supporting this" because one or two devs wanted it. We have a
semi-large base now, and decisions that weighty should be decided on
by all of us.

> 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.

That's fine. Keeping things open for _potential_ is always a good
thing, but I read what you said as if you were ready to move forward
with things as soon as we switched - it was a timing thing that made
me a little scared.

> 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.

Ah, so it was older.

For the record, Dan is doing some work so that pacman 3.X compiles on
FreeBSD. If anyone has anything to add to this, please let us know.

> Also afaik no answer to the PackageKit threads from the pacman devs.

http://archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2007-October/015885.html

Pacman will not support PackageKit, PackageKit will support ALPM.
Right now, I'm unconcerned. It looks like another fad.
If the PackageKit devs want our help, all they have to do is contact
us. Right now, however, it will not give us ANY benefit, so it would
simply raise our workload.

> Why do you want to integrate
> portability code (that was there in the past) back again if you are
> unsure to support it?

Because pacman is not ArchLinux. What ArchLinux does and what pacman
does are two different things. pacman is just a tool that HAPPENS to
be used by Arch, but does not define Arch.

> 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.

Well, keep us informed. There's nothing better one can do than to
garner interest in these projects. Nothing more motivating than having
other people interested in your ideas and wanting to help.

Let us know what you're up to. 8)

> 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.

This is hard. The workload will always be heavy, that's the way this
works. I'm going to see what I can do to automate more of these tasks
for us, so that rebuilding all these packages isn't as much of a
strain as it is now.