To get to our trees

Hi all,

I started hacking on a prototype for Repoteus.  Before everyone gets
excited (for good or bad), I already plan to throw parts of it away;
there are parts of this that obviously need further abstraction, but I
wanted to get something usable for testing out concepts.  Graham will be
assisting with development of various sub-components, and together we
should have something usable fairly soon.

During my prototyping, I've been trying to forumlate answers for some of
our rather more pressing questions:

How are we ensuring our backward compatibility with Gentoo for now?

The old trees can be overlain with the new trees.  As such, we can use
just about everything from one of their rsync trees, right out of the
box. With this in mind...

What is the least we can do to get a working Zynot distribution?

1) Subversion - ebuilds for the svn and its dependencies
2) Porteus - an ebuild for porteus, a tarball for distfiles
3) Repoteus - export the svn ebuild tree
4) rsync mirror - to download the ebuild tree
5) distfiles mirror - to download the porteus tarball

Thanks to Amir and Ueli at DataCore, #1 seems to be working pretty good
so far.  Jon Nall has done excellent work that should meets the needs
for #2, and he should be commiting it to svn.zynot.org soon for our
enjoyment.  After a little more discussion, we should be able to get #3
taken care of in short order.

In the mean time, there is nothing that prevents us from at least having
the facilities ready for #4 and #5, even if we don't have anything to
put in them just yet.  I believe that OSU will be taking care of us here
at first, but testing the transfer off our servers with dry runs and
getting everything pre-configured would be nice.

How will users upgrade from Gentoo?

1) Download the porteus ebuild tarball from the zynot.org website.
2) Unmerge portage, emerge Porteus, upgrade make.conf and friends.
3) Using Porteus, emerge the latest Porteus, Repoteus, and SVN packages.

Porteus should be configured to sync from zynot site first, and another
tree second.  As developers get signed up, we can import packages from
these other trees, enhancing them to support our new package manager
features.


I think this gives us a immediate path for getting something out there
for people to try.  We also need to develop the procedures for
interacting with the repository and our trees, as things will get
complicated unless we design our tools properly.  I think the underlying
tools and repository layout will help make these tools fairly easy to do
right, and I look forward to seeing their evolution progress.

During this phase, I am personally committed to ensuring that all of the
architecture leads get the support they need to get their packages into
the tree in a manner that is both maintainable and efficient.

Cheers,

Zach