[gentoo-releng] Status Report for Release Engineering

[gentoo-releng] Status Report for Release Engineering

[Chris Gianelloni]

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This is a current status of Release Engineering.  It basically says what
we've been doing and where we're going, in a pretty broad and general
sense.

Enjoy...

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Status Report for Release Engineering: Jan 3rd 2006

This is a simple status report for Release Engineering.  The basic premise of this report is to inform our users and developers where Release Engineering is currently and where we are going in the future.  This includes coordination work between Release Engineering and other teams.

2005.1-r1:
As you are all probably well aware by now, Release Engineering produced a 2005.1-r1 release based on the 2005.1 snapshot.  This media refresh was designed to resolve a few major bugs with the 2005.1 release and help users install Gentoo more effectively.  This release also introduced an amd64 Installer LiveCD image.  Very few bugs have been filed about this media refresh, which is a good thing.  However, there were many bugs from 2005.1 that we were unable to resolve due to wishing to base off the 2005.1 snapshot.  These bugs will be resolved with 2006.0's release.

2006.0:
We are currently in the Development/QA phase of the 2006.0 release.  We are currently working out the initial internal release schedule to determine availability of specific Architecture Coordinators.  The major goals of 2006.0 is to improve the Installer LiveCD for amd64/x86 and possibly introduce some new experimental CD images for further Gentoo Linux Installer development.  Release Engineering, along with the architecture teams, has been working to simplify and standardize the profiles under default-linux.  We hope in the future to make this even easier once multiple parent inheritance has been added to portage.  This release will also introduce NPTL as the default for all supporting architectures.  Legacy support for non-NPTL stages above stage1 will be dropped from all supporting architectures after this release.  This means there will be a stage3 tarball for no-nptl systems released with this release on architectures still supporting 2.4 kernels, but there will not be newer tarballs made with later releases.

Catalyst:
We are hard at work on stabilizing catalyst for a 2.0 release, which we will use for building the 2006.0 release, along with all future releases.  Catalyst 2.0 is a significant re-write of the core functionality fo catalyst to make it more modular and more maintainable, along with adding some much-needed features.  We plan on having a full catalyst 2.0 release into stable by the end of Febrary.  We have had quite a bit of help from various members of several architecture teams to improve support for some of the more esoteric architectures.

Installer:
The Gentoo Linux Installer project has been hard at work on the next version of the Gentoo Linux Installer, version 0.3, which will be released for x86 and amd64 along with the 2006.0 release media.  This will also be the first version of the Installer to become an offcially released and supported version for an architecture, as x86 will be releasing a Minimal InstallCD and Installer LiveCD, replacing the Universal InstallCD/PackageCD combination for GRP.

Future:
The future for Release Engineering is actually quite simple.  We hope to automate more of our processes by incorporating more and more into catalyst, to reduce the work load on the Architecture Coordinators and also to allow more of our projects to easily build release materials.  We hope to eventually move to an InstallCD/LiveCD combination for manual installs and GRP on all architectures.  Work is being focused on making these processes more architecture-neutral to allow for more standardization across architectures to give Gentoo releases a more uniform look and feel.

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