Update

All:

Quick updates on the GLI...

Who's who:

NM: Nathanial McCallum
SM: Scott Myron
CS: Cory Shields
KL: Kurt Lieber

- NM has completed more work on the InstallTemplate class (the core of 
control logic with things such as network setup, bootstrapping, emerge 
system, etc.). This brings InstallTemplate closer to completion. The 
majority of the "tough" work that remains is the device partitioning, 
give or take.

- SM has done more work on InstallProfile and the utility module to 
round things out. He's also been working on some snazzy security ideas 
related to the next item...

- KL presented an idea of having a simple web based profile generation 
tool where users could generate profiles that they can later install 
with the (hopefully) soon to be complete prototype. Everyone agreed that 
this is a great tool, but will NOT take the place of GUI down the road.

- CS began work on the web profile generator. In theory, this will lead 
the user though the options and generate an XML file that can be used as 
a deployment profile. (See the design documents for more details about 
what that means and how it all fits together).

- CS completed a GUI design draft and distributed it to some of the 
other devs. This is preliminary and not yet official hence why it hasn't 
be made public yet. CS will (probably) continue to refine this as more 
details become clear during prototype development. This DOES NOT mean we 
are going to release a GUI any time soon.

- A few of us have begun discussions about handling partitioning and the 
implementation details thereof. This is tricky and will initially handle 
simple cases. Support for advanced storage device configuration 
(software raid, lvm, etc.) will be included at a later date.

- Discussions have begun on how, specifically, architecture dependent 
cases will be implemented.

- I've added a centralized system for logging messages to a file.

- NM and SM have been updating the InstallProfile TODO document (see 
docs/InstallProfileTODO.txt). Hopefully, we will centralize our TODO 
lists soon.

- I will be releasing a formal time line (road map) for development that 
will finally answer the question of when there will be a public testable 
prototype and what features it will have, initially (and no, one of 
those features will not be a GUI). I'm trying to get this done as soon 
as possible, but it's very difficult to pinpoint times with volunteer 
developers and Real Life Interference.

- We had a quick status meeting in #gentoo-installer to discuss most of 
the things above.

Overall:

A lot of new code has been added, primarily in the InstallTemplate area. 
InstallProfile has seen refinement and improvement and is becoming a bit 
more solid. Things are really starting to take shape. The progress made 
and overall speed of development has increased greatly over the last few 
weeks.

As always, everyone is invited to participate in discussions in 
#gentoo-installer, where the magic happens.

-- 
Eric Sammer
Gentoo Linux
http://www.gentoo.org