[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda Weekly Report: 2011-07-22

[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda Weekly Report: 2011-07-22

[wiktor w brodlo]

Dear Gentooers!

*Intro*

Gentoo Anaconda is a fork of Sabayon Anaconda which is a fork of
Fedora/Red Hat Anaconda. Anaconda is an installer for Linux disros,
originally for Fedora/RH but now it's distro-independent and many
other distros use it as their installer. Sabayon is a binary distro
based on Gentoo.

* Progress so far *

I'm slowly working through the list I've posted in the pre-midterm
report. I've already removed some dependencies and some dead code from
the codebase, added a nice graphical banner on the installer, showing
the current chapter and a link to the appropriate page in the
handbook. I've made some of the screens prettier as well. Now the
installer doesn't need as much space on the ramdisk, because it's
smaller – but there's still A LOT of slimming to be done :-)
Over the weekend I'll *try* to build a LiveDVD with the installer on
it, but I can't promise I'll be able to do it over the weekend or at
all. If I don't find time over the weekend, I'll try it next week.

* Coming up next *

First of all, a big version bump. A lot of dependencies are quite
aged, and I'd like to try to bump them to newer versions. There are
also some improved ebuilds in the Sabayon overlay, I'll import them
into the Anaconda overlay. Some new rules have appeared with respect
to the EAPI use and I'll need to make sure the ebuilds conform to
these new rules. Apart from that, I'm sure there are more dependencies
to go, and I know for a fact that there's a lot of code waiting to be
removed from the codebase. I'll also continue with prettifying the
screens, one of the most important changes is to use a tree structure
for the mirror selection screen (for now it's just an ugly list). I
don't know how to create tree views in GTK+/Glade, so I'll need to
look that up ;-). If I still have time by the end of the week, I'll
implement validation to warn the user if they've entered invalid
settings (the new screens have no error checking yet).

See you later!
~ wiktor.