As after the release is before the release, we grab the opportunity to break some things in our infrastructure and put them back together again in a refined way. Last nights Core-Meeting was all about the shortcomings we found in our infrastructure and how to fix them.
The first change discussed was how our release process works. Up to now, when we release, we wait until a debian mirror sync is finished and start building our snapshots. This leaves us 6 hours between 2 syncs. As long as all is smooth, that is fine. Problems could delay a release easily though. Also, as we have more flavours than before, and will maybe add more in the future, the timeframe will one day become an issue. So we will add a proxy-cache or mirror here to be on the safe side of things. Should problems arise during the build-process, we can release a working snapshot from 6 hours or a day before without much extra work. This needs more discussion still as to what method and/or tool to use.
The 2nd change is upon the pyfll package lists themselves. We find what we forked from aptosid not really suitable anymore. This is maybe due to us having more flavours than our predecessor.We all experienced situations where we were not really sure where to add a new package or that we did not agree on a certain list to do so. This needs to be obvious and logical. Where a package belongs needs to be straight forward and doubtfree. So reorganizing of these lists is needed. Until the next meeting we will think about the modells discussed last night. We got a lot closer to a compromise than we were a month ago, when a boxing fight looked like a fast way to settle the differences 🙂
Last, but not least we discussed our repository structure. What packages belong in what repos? Do we have too many or not enough repos and are they named accordingly to what packages they house. We agreed, we have one or two to many and that some renaming is needed. Users will not stumble over this, because we will provide links that keep the sources.list intact and working.
Before i forget: Whoever read the log of our last meeting 2 weeks ago, will have seen that we replaced 2 coreteam members. Vibora and edhunter do not have the time to work in our core teamat the moment. They were replaced by hendrikl and Goingeasy9. The vote on that can be seen in the log. Thanks to vibora and edhunter for their good work in the past few years. Your code lives on in siduction.