versioned /etc

regen2 should support an /etc that's under version control. something like etckeeper could/should work. Or we could just build our own tool for use with an existing vcs.

Dan Robbins Tarballs

I think having weekly tarballs is a great idea. But I'm less concerned about the release schedule of such things for regen2 and more concerned about the system packages that tarballs contain. A new tarball should be released, 1 week after a new glibc or gcc is updated, for sure, but any system package should be enough. Why 1 week? well once they stabilize they will hit a lot more people who are likely to have bugs, and that gives time for bugs to be fixed before tar-ing it. Why those 2 packages in particular? They are huge and take a long time to compile.

I'd like to warn people about using Dan Robbins tarballs. I don't think they are stable. I was building 2 systems recently and one was built off of the last Gentoo i686 tarball the other was built off of Dans latest tarball (I think, I had really lost track after 2-3 weeks). I went to build mysql, it failed to build on the Dan Robbins tarball system, couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason why, other than maybe something on his tarball was weird. So I grabbed a gentoo tarball and started over (note both system's were chroot's at the time and had the exact same configs, just different hardware underneath). Everything went fine the second time I tried. So just a word of warning, his tarball's may have problems. No I haven't reported this to him, I don't have the error anymore either, I unfortunately didn't have a good way to get one to him at the time.

EDIT: A more recent post from him suggests that this may have been cause by him using the 2007.1 profile which was never really released.

no more stabalizing rx one after another

so yesterday gentoo stabilized. gentoo-sources 2.6.24-r3 today they are stabilizing 2.6.24-r4. Come on people? I just built the damn kernel didn't you test long enough before releasing? well here goes building another kernel.

buildpkg

emerge-ng should be able to build rpms, and debs. regen2 should be the distro that builds other distro's, not only should it be good at that (gentoo is now) it should be designed for it.

kde-overlay (svn) now requires paludis

details are here

so apparently the folks running the kde overlay have decided to discontinue portage compatibility. I suppose I can't blame them, on the other hand I don't approve. Even though I haven't started testing paludis yet. I am still firmly against it as it is as gentoo's next package manager. I won't be regen2's without heavy modification. Including some re-writes. I do intend to investigate the possibility of using paludis code in emerge-ng.

pkgcore & paludis

So I figure it isn't fair to judge them without using them for a bit (even though they miss the mark of being drop in). over then next few days I will be testing them to see how they work.

emerge-ng multiple trees

first I hate repositories, but it is unlikely they will go away. So we must strive to make sure that they are only needed for truly rare things. from my perspective the sunrise repo shouldn't exist. and vcs builds should be in the tree. regen2 should strive to have everything possible in the tree. when it can't an overlay should have all the capabilities of the main tree. meaning that an overlay shouldn't automagically be considered less stable and require the keywording of all the ebuilds in it. also overlay's should be search-able regardless of whether they are installed to expedite the finding of apps.

emerge-ng and vcs builds

gentoo is a source based distribution, and this is a good thing. why then has the ability to have trunk builds (which has been added to many overlay's) seem like such a hack? all non-binary program ebuilds in the tree should have a 'trunk' version option. emerge --sync should then be able to find out whether trunk has been updated so you can correctly rebuild programs as needed with emerge --ask --verbose --update --deep --newuse world

what is regen2 linux?

In short a concept aimed at forking Gentoo Linux. First some history and my own experiences.

Gentoo is a sick adolescent who refuses to acknowledge his illness. Because he refuses to acknowledge the illness he can't be helped. There are many who have ideas about how to help him. Some of those are wrong.

Gentoo's biggest problem? Democracy. Making it actually work is not easy. Most of the really successful, open source, projects have one or two people at the top. A good benevolent leader is needed, imho. Gentoo's developer council did not seem to have things under control for the better part of 2007. Some things seem to have improved but I have lost faith in them.

Dan Robbins (gentoo's creator an prior benevolent dictator) made 2 offers to help, but left quickly after both. It is obvious that he can't/won't (shouldn't?) attempt to save Gentoo.

Political is Gentoo's biggest thorn and as a result it is suffering technically.

Portage (gentoo's ports like package manager) is said to be unmaintainable, buggy, and un-fixable. I believe there are 3 package managers being written separately, with the idea of being alternatives. From what I've seen of Paludis and Pkg-core neither of them have the right idea for an actual replacement. I will go into that in another post.

Gentoo's dev's have no respect for standards or conventions, and as such certain area's which could be easily fixed have suffered. such as Gentoo's Apache binary being named apache and apache2 instead of httpd which is mostly a convention, or the lack of an /srv which is not optional according to FHS.

Gentoo lacks a sense of business, to the point the foundations charter was revoked (or was it almost revoked, plenty of confusion to be sure). If support rallies behind me (or the idea) I fully intend on incorporating for the purpose of commercially supporting the distribution.

In short, I hope ReGen2 will be a commercial funded, rapid developing, fast, versatile, source based linux distribution. Which will continue to be a leader in the open source world.

emerge-ng

at the time of this writing. a concept for software with a name that may not be it's final, and it may never get done.

emerge-ng should ultimately be a drop in replacement for the portage package (the main package manager) in gentoo linux.

for clarity I will be referring to portage as the software and if I mean to refer to portage's tree (basically one giant software repository), I will refer to it that way.

I know of at least 3 other projects to replace the outdated barely maintainable portage. I think all of them are going about it wrong. They are developing different package manager's instead of developing a better version of emerge. They are right that portage needs to be rebuilt from ground up, but that doesn't mean that the interface the user sees is bad. if vim had not tried to be mostly a clone of vi would it have been as successful? so successful that is it more popular than what it cloned? if gnu coreutils weren't posix compliant and didn't mostly match the original unix commands would we be using them? probably not.

I will be writing posts here to detail features that emerge-ng can benefit from.