During NewYear's meeting we came up with some goals and some thoughts on
freepto development.
Summary
============
* Berenjena
** missing things and release date
* Chips
** git branches reorganization
** jessie migration
** move to syslinux
** new features
* contribute to debian
* infrastructure
** buildbot
** mirrors
Berenjena
===================
we are REALLY close to release!
missing things and release date
--------------------------------
it's just tortp localization and new documentation.
The new doc is quite similar to the old one, the main part to change is
the one about persistence. There is already a good draft in italian[1],
but it needs to be translated.
BoySka will update the wiki in italian and english tomorrow (saturday
3rd of January). paskao will care about the castillan version.
vinc3nt will localize tortp in italian in the 5th of january. paskao
will do the castillan one.
A greek version will be built, even if the l10n for freepto-specific
part is not present.
maintainance
------------
freepto has an history of big releases after long time. This is not a
good thing, and we have always promised to do smaller, quicker releases.
We want to try again with this, separating the maintainance of the
berenjena branch from the chips one (see also the section about git branches).
This should allow for quick, minor changes to be introduced without
problems.
metapackages
--------------
One change that we want to do is to have a freepto metapackage that
depends on other freepto-selected software. This is similar, in spirit,
to things like task-xfce or ubuntu-desktop. The user that does an
upgrade will not only upgrade his software, but also get new one we are
now recommending.
Chips
===================
Chips is the name for the next release. It will be 2.0. The name starts
with letter C, is a famous fried food, does not derive from animals and
has a clear connection with computers.
git branches reorganization
---------------------
the branch "master" will no longer exist. Current master will become
"berenjena", and another branch called "chips" will fork from it. This
seems to us a cleaner development model, even if cloning would probably
be not-so-intuitive.
jessie migration
---------------------
migration to jessie seems an obvious goal for Chips. It could reserve
some problems, so this could be a major task.
Some things that came to our mind:
* check if systemd is working fine :)
* gpg2.1 is very different from gpg2.0. Is enigmail behaving?
move to syslinux
---------------------
we currently have an ugly hack to support UEFI: we have a grub binary
inside the source code, and we install it overriding binary_yaboot. The
configuration is "converted" from syslinux to grub.
That's the ugliest thing I have ever written.
We should move to use only syslinux. Bonus points if this will also
support uefi32
new features
---------------------
We have a bunch of idea that we like very much:
* coffer
https://github.com/boyska/coffer/ as a way to simplify
gpg keysigning party
* some kind of automagic support for mesh networks. We are thinking about
BATMAN + IPv6autoconfiguration. This is, again, in the spirit of
making the effort of having a local network as easy as possible
* automatic-fry: a tool that will make it VERY easy to create a new
freepto. Or a new tails. Or whatever. Just insert an usb stick and let
it do the rest.
* doublefried: correlated with automatic-fry, create a tool that will
make it easy to "clone" a freepto into a new one. This means that from
a freepto you can create another one without having to fetch it again.
This should be sharable with many other similar distributions
* remove truecrypt
* plymouth, or some other way of having a nicer boot screen. Especially,
make it clear when freepto is asking for a password.
* migration tool
contribute to debian
===================
We have some packages that we would very much like to share with anyone
in the community.
* tortp is generic, and could be useful for other systems
* passwords-changer: there is no simple graphical tool in debian to
change your password. ATM this also contains the disk part. To avoid
being freepto-specific, this should be modularized into two distinct
part which (using setuptools entrypoint) can be used together.
* thunar-actions-plugin is a nice plugin which is still not packaged.
* thunar-shred. We would like to make it easier to integrate thunar with
shred. Our current implementation, based on uca.xml, can not be
packaged. Using thunar-actions-plugin, we could.
* freepto-usb-utils. We should de-brand it. Also, it should be splitted
without gtk parts and non-gtk ones. It can be useful for other
live-build based systems. We could call them live-persistence-utils
and live-persistence-utils-gtk
infrastructure
===================
while our infrastructure "just works", it is a real mess: the fabric
script only partially works, there is no notion of load distribution
among build nodes, and similar problems. We want to address this problems
buildbot
---------------------
buildbot is "sth like jenkins" but with a more imperative approach. We
want to use it to manage a set of buildslaves, with different
charateristics: creating new builds, and testing builds. We consider
these to be two different part of the creation of an image, and we want
to be able to run these two parts in different nodes (not every node is
powerful enough to run a build, and not every node is able to run tests
because they require kvm)
mirrors
---------------------
we are looking for some mirror to have better availability
[1]
https://we.riseup.net/freepto-wiki/persistence-it
Hope that's all and... happy new year!
--
boyska
