[Frugalware-devel] todo for 0.9

[Gabriel C]

Miklos Vajna wrote:
> hi,
> 
> sadly, we haven't had a collected todo for 0.8 and i want to return to
> the habit to have such a todo on the wiki. (or in the bts as tasks, but
> this does not matter at the moment)

BTS task is far better really.

> 
> so here are a few ideas for 0.9:
> 
> 1) improved security support
> 
> first, voroskoi said privately to me that he would like to step down as
> security maintainer as the quality of the support he provided for 0.8
> was not that high as he wanted. i think we all should thank him for all
> the work he did for a security monkey ;)
> 
> at the end i did the sec support for 0.8, so i can keep doing so,
> provided that somebody opens the necessary tasks (that's the only thing
> i haven't done and i would like to avoid so if possible.) i suspect that
> crazy is silently already doing so but now i ask officially if he
> volunteer to do this :)
> 

Sure , I can even push stuff if you want but I don't want to do this paper work ;)

( /me hides :-) )

> back to the title of this section, i would like to create a private
> mailing list (security-private@ or so) where only the devels who push
> sec fixes to -stable subscribed. don't worry this is not about not
> trusting everybody but in case the number of members of that list is
> low, it's easier to get it subscribed to private security lists.
> 
> (in short: if crazy says yes for this task opening stuff then i would
> like to subscribe only vmiklos@ and crazy@ there for now.)

fine with me.

> 
> as a first step to improve something i changed the fsa-sender script to
> include a deeplink to the fsa on the web (also the webpage has the
> ability to show only one fsa) so that if we later fix a typo or
> anything, that's handy.
> 
> 2) chost change
> 
> this is something we already discussed with crazy and already merged.
> till now we had i686-pc-linux-gnu and x86_64-unknown-linux, now we have
> {i686,x86_64}-frugalware-linux
> 
> 3) initrd
> 
> do we want this? i remember crazy played with it but officially we still
> don't use initrd.

I've played with initramfs yes but it was based on upstart repo ..It was
not ready anyway.

I'm not sure we should do it for 0.9 but in general we want that support.

> 
> goals: currently we build in a lot of drivers most users don't need,
> having that in memory is a nightmare. also having the ability to encrypt
> / or having / on lvm sounds nice.

/me has no clue about this stuff 

I'm fine if someone want to add that support as long is not the default.

> 
> problems: ok, that's quite personal. having a built-in raid1 support
> with autodetection is quite nice. but maybe we could keep that
> in-kernel..
> 
> 4) gservice
> 
> BMH wrote frugalrledit in py which is currently unmaintained and priyank
> offered to write a replacement in C, named gservice (gui to
> /sbin/service). i think that would be nice.

Why not :) 

> 
> 5) graphical installer
> 
> when we were at 0.1 i thought a graphical installer for 1.0 is a
> musthave. nowadays i'm not that sure. if we want it, how do we want it?
> having a so-called installer (which in fact isn't a real installer) like
> Ubuntu has? (fwlive+a pygtk or pyqt script) or do we want a real
> graphical installer like Fedora does?
> 
> i think a graphical installer is more like the later, but that's more
> complicated and i'm not too motivated to code it :S

Well you can write an graphical installer in some weeks , heh.

The LiveCD-installer-mode can be done even using dialog :-) hehe but then we will face some problems
because we *have* to *force* an default install.

( already played with something like this :-D )

> 
> 6) sysvinit-translations
> 
> you probably remember when Alex started to work on upstart. then it
> turned out that it lacks of basic features like disabling a service.
> finally Alex resigned and nobody continued that work, so it seems we
> will still use sysvinit for a while.

Not officially yes I did on my local tree but to be honest upstart is all but ready.

When I want to replace sysvinit I do *not* want to use an different init system in
* sysvinit compat * mode at all.

In sort as long upstrat does _not_ have any stable formats etc we should not even think about to use it.


> 
> currently the po files of the init scripts are in fst which is quite
> problematic. i would propose to move the po files to a separate package
> (sysvinit-translations or so) and then we could integrate it with
> pootle, so that it would not contain Hungarian translations only.

Sounds fine to me

> 
> 7) having the usb and tftp installer in fwsetup
> 
> we already support installing from usb and tftp, but i think we could
> improve it.
> 
> first, the usb installer almost works only if you install the initrd to
> the usb stick under Frugalware, so if you only have a bsd, windows or
> even a different distro, it may or may not work. it's a bit ugly but we
> could just provide an image so that you can dd/rawrite it to the usb
> stick on any os. this will erase everything on the pendrive, but it
> seems everybody else provides such usb images and users don't complain.
> 
> second, both images are build manually (by me..) before releases, and i
> hate doing it again and again. you may remember that the kernel and the
> setup initrd is already handled by syncd as it's in the fwsetup package.
> we could just improve the fwsetup package and have them there, so that
> we could ensure they are built in a clean chroot as well.
> 
> 8) fwlive on x86_64
> 
> this is just an idea, but if janny and others willing to work on this..
> it would be nice to have an x86_64 livecd as well, so that one could try
> our distro's x86_64 port without installing it.

I can try that but I don't have any AMD box.

Anyway I have a lot hacks local for FW Live already which I need to test much better before
sending to janny.

> 
> 9) improving syncd to transfer repoman.conf
> 
> currently each syncpkgcd (we have 4 ones) has a hardwired repoman.conf
> to know what 'current' and 'stable' means. if we want to use syncd to
> sync wip repos, this is problematic, i don't want to manually update the
> repoman.confs on each machine, not counting that i don't even have shell
> to some of them. so we could store a central repoman.conf in syncpkgd
> and the syncpkgcds could just download it from time to time, allowing is
> to just drop-in new repos to sync if we want.

yay :)

> 
> 10) using gettext for news entries and newsletters
> 
> i recently noticed that po4a has support for xhtml and xml, we could
> give it a try. the result would be that one could translate these
> articles from pootle. (currently usually ironiq and hermier does it, and
> they have commit access.)
> 
> ok, this is enough for now.
> 
> comments?
> 
> other ideas? :)

11) Poke at current setup / install really hard

We need add a lot more debug to setup/installer , make all big changes in pre1/pre2 and test test test
We have some strange bugs in there , really.
 
( and it does not matter if we start on gtk/qt based one is not likely to be ready in 0.9 )

12) Cleanup the repo , thing about groups ( new groups ? ) , create the 'default desktop' groups at least so one could use these in 
    installer. Solve the problems with conflicting packages etc

12a) When 12 is done figure the size on CD1 so minimal installs of all 3 major desktops is possible.

13) We need a project site for any kind 'Artwork' and probably a repo for it.

 
> 
> thanks for reading this loooong letter.
> 

Thx for posting it :)

crazy