[arch-dev-public] Overview of the current Arch Linux organisation

[Allan McRae]

Hi all,

The reason I had did roll call was to see if there was any areas that we
could improve.  We have grown as a distribution over the years and holes
in our organisation of certain areas are beginning to show.

So here is my summary of our current status.  Feel free to point out
things I missed.


Packaging: This is the lifeblood of Arch, and we do quite well at
keeping everything up-to-date (although a few packages can have updates
waiting for a long time). One thing the roll call does show is there are
quite a few major packaging areas that are covered by a single person
(desktops, major programming languages, etc).  We should fix these
single points of failure by building a small team around these major
groups (lead by the current packager). This would be a way to bring on
junior packagers (who can initially prepare and commit updates to SVN,
but not build them).

Support: We have good groups of people in charge of moderating the
forums, IRC and the wiki.  These are largely self managing and take on
new members as needed.  We also have a singular bug triage person.

Security: The new security team is doing a great job at monitoring
security issues.  There are three main people there - they will need to
comment on whether they need more man power there. It would also be
great to give some of them packaging rights so they do not need to chase
the devs/TUs to build fixed packages.  This group is also looking at
reproducible builds.

Pacman: Currently, we have two main developers, with a bunch of
occasional submitters. pacman-5.0 is about to be released with hooks!
More man power would be good - we have several major features planned
and lots of tiny ones.

Release Iso:  A new one gets created every month, so things seem to be
working...  I had a quick look at the mailing list at it is fairly
quiet.  I'm not sure if this is because the iso is fairly stable at this
stage, or that it needs some focus.

AUR:  New AUR is up and running.  Again, seems to be progressing well
and I have not hear complaints about lack of manpower...

Infrastructure: This seems an area that needs improved.  We have one
person organising payment for servers, one person doing the sysadmin,
various people in charge of updating the forum, wiki, planet, bug
tracker(?), AUR, projects,...  It looks like there has been no commits
to our website front- and back-end in six months.  Overall, our
infrastructure is an area that needs attention - our servers have had
some consolidation partially completed and more planning done, but this
has progressed nowhere.  We also have space issues due to this.

Devtools/dbscripts:  These seem to be updated as needed. We still do not
have repository signing... The autobuild tool for big rebuilds is
awesome - it will be useful in the future to make this more official and
have the infrastructure hosted on our servers.


Long email!

I think the one glaring area where we need to be more organised is our
infrastructure.  I will bring together the people currently involved
with this area in the next few days so we can get this fixed.

Allan