Beginning of the Month Update for December

[JMiahMan]

Greetings!

              I am writing this to both google groups. We have an older ul-developers group that I think a lot of people are still on.. former, current and maybe future developers for the most part and then we have our unity-linux group that's published on IRC for anyone with general interest.

First up I am going to go over some web resources (links) as things may have changed, we are always updating and moving forward.

http://unity-linux.org is still the website. This is actually hosted on my home machine. On it we have news, an about page, chat (a web based chat client), code (a place to download test rpms/isos) and a link to the wiki (old link).

This is my default development box hosting the latest ISOs and RPMs, however bandwidth is limited. If I can find a server that's cheap, decent speed and that can run rsync as a daemon I'll migrate off my home server.

http://unitylinux.com is a backup page that syncs with unity-linux.org so it offers the same links and sites.

This site is hosted on GoDaddy as I got it very cheap (almost free, but limited in function can't run rsyn as a daemon) it syncs the site, RPMs and ISOs every 10 Minutes, speeds are a lot faster.

http://dev.unitylinux.com is our bug/issue/request tracker and the home of our future wiki. bugs/issues can sync with commits in github

https://github.com/jmiahman/unity-linux is our current github repo where spec files, patches, and tools are kept. Feel free to fix issues and do pull requests from the web interface, even if it's just grammar corrections.

So now that we have gone quickly over some resources, let's talk development. Last month I was able to package Xorg and Wayland. With Xorg I packaged Enlightenment 19 and got it up and running. Very minimal, no sound, and really no applications other then a terminal. It's kinda big news not in the fact it's really usable at this point but that my proof of concept of being able to build a distro with a non GNU tool chain can work and well enough at this point that I can even do it and for that matter run a Desktop Environment. Others have already Alpine, VOID and even Gentoo, however not one of them used rpm. Talking further about rpm, we started off with RPM5 as it was rather easy for me to get working and it was what Unity Linux had used in the past. Currently though it seems it's development is only focused on the needs of Yocto Linux and distros like OpenMandriva (and PLD) have to keep maintenance of hundreds of patches. That might be okay (I'm sure not great) for a larger distro, but it's not so much for me. So I have shifted future development, with the help of the MUSL team, rpm.org and the over achiever Neal (ngompa), to rpm.org (or RPM4). RPM 4 development has really picked up a majority of the features that were in RPM5 and now even more features ie. like RPM 4 having it's own db system and not relying on Berkeley DB in the next version 4.14. RPM 4 is also more widely adopted and so there seems to be quite a bit more resources. Not to mention with rpm 4.14 there will no longer be a need for MUSL patches as they will be supporting MUSL OTB. Using RPM 4 also gives us a upgrade path to DNF and libsolv. Work has already been underway to get libsolv to work.. and it does with Unity Linux. Seemingly we have one package hawkey holding us back from being able to implement DNF, this is due to a nonstandard qsort_r call. Moving from yum to DNF is rather important as well as it allows us to have a future upgrade path and opens up GUI tools like yumex-dnf which is non PackageKit and then various Packagekit frontends as well. There's also a good chance that sometime in the not so distant future I will be packaging Mock and the packages needed to have a Koji build server.

One big issue that we have and it was solely my fault, because I was lazy, was I placed all libs in /lib and /usr/lib. So right now I am repackaging for RPM 4, cleaning specs and placing 64bit libs in lib64 and /usr/lib64. This will allow for future 32bit builds and for my EeePCs to have a form of Unity Linux on them at some point (most likely Synergy running lxqt).

So our focus right now is on multiple fronts. Repackaging and editing specs for RPM 4 and multilib. We'll be focusing on getting hawkey running with MUSL for further adoption of DNF (and other packaging utils) will come with that. While I am repackaging I will also be working on package standards for the Wiki and Documentation, some talk has already started on that. Expect new packages while I am packaging to appear, perl modules, python 3, gtk+2, and cups will be biggies. Then there's also the issue with our text based installer that needs to be fixed. It will most likely get fixed as I start to roll out ISOs again and I will have a call for testing on most of this stuff. 

After a majority of the above stuff is taken care of I can start doing CLI releases and in the release Beta phase I will branch in git and start on the GUI side of things like Xdm needing to be tested further and prettified along with alsa and pulseaudio. Then depending on feedback from our resident Enlightenment guy (OnlyHuman) I will most likely upgrade to E20 start on an Enlightenment branch and then on my lxqt branch (Synergy).

That's the plan.. If you see yourself in any of this let me know and I will find work for you! Hope you all have a great Christmas, and are safe.

Kind Regards,

JMiahMan 

[Kate Draven]

well written.
I do have one question. Why the use of non GNU tool chain?
Kate