[pacman-dev] 3.1 release, pacman-git builds, etc.

[Dan McGee]

I'll try to keep this short and sweet, and hopefully this wakes up the
ghosts on the mailing list and we can make a push to get 3.1 released
sometime in the relatively soon future.

I've made a PKGBUILD that I threw together tonight to actually test
pacman on my system without killing the working pacman 3.0.X install.
It installs pacman and all its files to /usr/local, which is rather
convenient for testing as you can just switch that directory in and
out of your path as necessary. It also skips the complicated renames
of files, and as a bonus, gives our autoconf script some testing with
alternate install locations. However, it is configured to use your
current db and cache at the /var location, so don't think that is
necessarily safe (although it better be).

Here is the most recent build as of when I am writing this email, use
at your own risk!
http://www.archlinux.org/~dan/pacman-git-3.1.0devel-2-i686.pkg.tar.gz
http://www.archlinux.org/~dan/pacman-git_PKGBUILD

With that said, I need your guys help testing this stuff out AND
fixing the bugs and snags we hit that prevent us from releasing. The
things on my list that definitely need to be done:

* Ensure our config file changes are not necessary; e.g. old config
files should mostly work with the new software. I fixed a few of these
issues tonight.
* General usability tests. Make sure things are acting as they should,
no regressions, etc.
* Merge the asciidoc branch and get our manpages up to snuff.
* Figure out why Doxygen is generating some extra unnecessary
manpages, and find a way to kill it.
* makepkg testing. A lot of it, I haven't really used the new one at
all since I tend to build official packages with the current release
of makepkg to make sure it doesn't break things.
* Translation updates. This could be a killer, but even if people
don't get all the scripts translated we should try to get the
pacman/libalpm translations back up to 100%. We lost a lot of messages
because we cut debug translations, so that should help.
* Testing of every bug on Flyspray marked "requires testing" and set
to be fixed in 3.1.
* Anything else you guys can think of. Please reply and post it and
make sure it gets addressed.

I've already got some ideas for 3.2/4.0 up my sleeve, but I'll put
those in another email so we stay on topic here. And unless your idea
is absolutely essential for a 3.1 release, try to keep them there as
well.

-Dan