[Dev] [Monthy tech talk] December 2014

Luke Shumaker lukeshu at sbcglobal.net
Sun Dec 7 06:40:26 GMT 2014


From Icarious' original email on the proposal to orginise Parabola:

> Internally, the committee manages the project and defines its
> vision. There should be regular (monthly) talks within the
> committee, to see how they can assist their work. A main task of the
> committee therefore involves coordination and communication.

I guess I'll kick that off.

Things that I'm currently working on:

 - `hackers.git`-based user management for the server

   And it's currently a mess.  Some of it is through the old
   hackers.git, some of it is through the new 'lukeshu/restructure'
   branch.

   https://projects.parabola.nu/hackers.git/
   https://projects.parabola.nu/~lukeshu/hackers-nslcd.git/

   I think I'm a couple of good days of work away from having
   hackers-nslcd (nshcd?) working.  It will probably be a while before
   I can sit down and make that happen though.

   I've also avoided talking about this one because it's currently
   such a mess. I guess I figure I'd clean it up before inflicting it
   on others.

 - Git-based wiki

   There are 2 parts to this that are both huge amounts of work:
   1) Getting data out of {Arch,Parabola}Wiki and into git.
   2) Getting MediaWiki-compatible rendering that references git.

   At some point in the past, I was working on #1, but I don't know if
   I ever published anything.

   I'm now working on #2 (hacking up MediaWiki), but don't have
   anything worth sharing yet.

 - Maven

   Good Maven packaging is the linchpin to a bunch of freedom issues
   with Java packaging.  There are more than 100 freedom issues
   related to Maven in Parabola right now (I've lumped them into a
   giant "Maven-catch-all" on the bugtracker).

   Fun story: Nobody's actually managed to bootstrap/compile Maven
   entirely from source in more than a decade.  Maven dependency
   management just downloads the last version!

   I've been working on "maven-dist" to make compiling Maven possible.
   It also deals with a bunch of other Maven-related packages.  I seem
   to always think I'm closer to being done than I am.

   However, there are several things that can already be backported
   from maven-dist into packages, but I haven't because I'm lazy.
   Namely, "simple-maven" (living in `rules/_generic` in
   maven-dist.git), which is a simple clone of Maven that I wrote that
   is able to correctly build most Maven-using packages.  It should be
   used to replace Maven in most PKGBUILDs.

   https://projects.parabola.nu/~lukeshu/maven-dist.git/

 - Having dbscripts hook into XBS (or: Arch packages in abslibre.git)

   XBS is the generic mechanism for talking to ABS/ABSLibre/whatever
   replaces them.

   This integration would allow abslibre.git to have the PKGBUILDS
   from Arch, as well as keeping a copy that is in sync with the
   packages on each architecture.

   It just needs to call `xbs release-server` for each package while
   runnign `db-update`.  The developer-side part of this is already
   implemented in libretools

   Of course, then we get to the issue of db-sync not actually using
   db-update, but doing everything manually.  Which brings us to...

 - db-import (a replacement for db-sync/abslibre)

   Yeah, it syncs PKGBUILDs and packages together, and a couple other
   improvements.

I'm welcome to help on any of these!  Recently, I've been a little
pre-occupied with all of my classes (hence my sporadic presence on
IRC).

Which of these do you guys think are important?  What else should we
be working on?

--
Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker



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