Some Tanglu updates…

Long time since I published the last update about Tanglu. So here is a short summary about what we did meanwhile (even if you don’t hear that much, there is lots of stuff going on!)

Better QA in the archive

We now use a modified version of Debian’s Britney tool to migrate packages from the newly-created “staging” suite to our current development branch “aequorea”. This ensures that all packages are completely built on all architectures and don’t break other packages.

New uploads and syncs/merges now happen through the staging area and can be tested there as well as being blocked on demand, so our current aequorea development branch stays installable and usable for development. People who want the *very* latest stuff, can embed the staging-sources into their sources.list (but we don’t encourage you to do that).

Improved syncs from Debian

The Synchrotron toolset we use to sync packages with Debian recently gained the ability to sync packages using regular expressions. This makes it possible to sync many packages quickly which match a pattern.

Tons of infrastructure bugfixes

The infrastructure has been tweaked a lot to remove quirks, and it now works quite smoothly. Also, all Debian tools now work flawless in the Tanglu environment.

A few issues are remaining, but nothing really important is affected anymore (and some problems are merely cosmetic).

Long term we plan to replace the Jenkins build-infrastructure with the software which is running Paul Tagliamontes debuild.me (only the buildd service, the archive will still be managed by dak). This requires lots of work, but will result in software not only usable by Tanglu, but also by Debian itself and everyone who wants a build-service capable of building a Debian-distro.

KDE 4.10 and GNOME 3.8

Tanglu now offers KDE 4.10 by default, a sync of GNOME 3.8 is currently in progress. The packages will be updated depending on our resources and otherwise just be synced from Debian unstable/experimental (and made working for Tanglu).

systemd 204 & libudev1

Tanglu now offers systemd 204 as default init system, and we transitioned the whole distribution to the latest version of udev. This even highlighted a few issues which could be fixed before the latest systemd reached Debian experimental. The udev transition went nicely, and hopefully Debian will fix bug#717418 too, soon, so both distributions run with the same udev version (which obviously makes things easier for Tanglu ^^)

Artwork

We now have a plymouth-bootscreen and wallpapers and stuff is in progress 🙂

Alpha-release & Live-CD…?

This is what we are working on – we have some issues in creating a working live-cd, since live-build does have some issues with our stack. We are currently resolving issues, but because of the lack of manpower, this is progressing slowly (all contributors also work on other FLOSS projects and of course also have their work :P)

As soon as we have working live-media, we can do a first alpha release and offer installation media.

You!

Tanglu is a large task. And we need every help we can get, right now especially technical help from people who can build packages (Debian Developers/Maintainers, Ubuntu developers, etc.) We especially need someone to take care of the live-cd.

But also the website needs some help, and we need more artwork or improved artwork 😉 In general, if you have an idea how to make Tanglu better (of course, something which matches it’s goals 😛 ) and want to realize it, just come back to us! You can reach us on the mailiglists (tanglu-project for stuff related to the project, tanglu-devel for development of the distro) or in #tanglu / #tanglu-devel (on Freenode).