8:47 p.m.
Hi all,
I'd like to have a discussion on whether or not it would be worth it to
invest actual time and resources into the following projects before we
release 1.0. Perhaps we could even delay 1.0's release slightly, if
they are deemed critical enough.
PackageKit Plugin for APK
=========================
This would allow us to have graphical UIs for installing, removing, and
updating packages with APK for "free". One thing that bothers me is
that APK doesn't yet have tagging or category support, so every package
would be in a single, large, unwieldy list. It'd be very nice if we
could add tagging first.
Of course, writing the plugin and then adding tagging to APK later is
another option.
Note that both KDE (Muon) and Gnome (gnome-packagekit) have GUI tools
built on top of PackageKit, so we would not need to write any GUIs.
Parcel
======
This is the Web and CLI UI for determining package availability,
version, and architectures. Similar to Alpine's pkgdb or Gentoo's
Package Home for the Web UI, and similar to eix on the CLI.
I still think this is a very worthy endeavour, but time is a precious
commodity and I don't know if we have the time to build it before 1.0
unless 1.0 is delayed.
Register
========
This is the popcon-like system that will let us explore and inspect
packages that are popular (and not popular) with the user community at
large. Cadey on IRC has been writing a prototype.
This, too, seems like a very important feature for 1.0.
Steam with gcompat
==================
I still have been unable to test the Steam binary on gcompat because it
requires 32-bit x86 and I don't have a 32-bit x86 installation with
gcompat anywhere. (The only 32-bit x86 install I have of Adélie,
outside of the builders, is a 500 MHz Pentium III laptop. Hardly an
amazing gaming system, that.)
I don't know if that is important enough to work on for 1.0, since you
can just use an Ubuntu chroot to play Steam games (this also prevents
the icky binary blobs from touching your rootfs). However, I will defer
to the community for that decision.
MIPS
====
We desired MIPS support in 1.0 before the Alpine rebase. I do have a
MIPS32 CI20 and a MIPS64 Indy, but I don't think either one of them
would be able to compose the entire distro in any decent amount of time.
We could still likely have a bootable image before 1.0 release if we
start now. Again, I'm not sure if the community desire is high enough
to warrant that as a "distraction" when it can wait for 1.5 or 2.0.
GNOME 3
=======
I believe aerdan@ has a partially working GNOME 3 tree in his
elementary-os branch of packages.git. I know that some packages were
requiring Python 2 (if I recall) and that was the end of that.
I would not mind putting in some effort to try and port those packages
to Python 3 if GNOME 3 is still a desktop we want to offer in 1.0.
Horizon
=======
There has been renewed interest in Horizon since the linux-wiiu team has
joined us. We could likely spin partitioning out to KDE Partition
Manager (https://www.kde.org/applications/system/kdepartitionmanager).
Since the linux-wiiu would like Horizon to use PackageKit (so that it
can handle any future pivots, if desired), it'd be a great idea to have
an APK PackageKit backend before we go back to Horizon.
Others?
=======
If anyone has any other 1.0 goals that aren't covered in the current
roadmap (https://wiki.adelielinux.org/wiki/Project:Roadmap), let's
discuss them here.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org