News from the 1.7 - 2.0 development
About the 1.7 treeDuring the ROCK Linux developers meeting at 18C3 in Berlin we discussed the future of ROCK Linux after stabalizing the 1.6 tree. A lot of possible new features and code-restructurings where discussed, which are now finding their way into the ROCK Linux 1.7 development tree which should become the 2.0 release when it's ready (which will be by the end of this year).
New featuresNew fetures in ROCK Linux 1.7 (2.0) are:
- The code is much cleaner and open for custom extensions.
- Only one package format for all packages. Instead of the old base/ext system, we have diffrent repositories: 'base' and 'x11' for the "core distribution" on the one side and 'clifford', 'rene' and 'sourceforge' (named by their maintainers) for additional packages on the other side.
- The 'subdistributions' have been replaced by 'targets'. A target is something like the "main function" of the distribution build which builds all the packages and may also do some other stuff. There is a 'generic' target which can be seen as the "normal ROCK Linux".
- Flexible and extendable configuration. It's possible to e.g. choose 'dietlibc' instead of 'glibc' or select the compiler which should be used for building the system.
- The work done by the dROCK project will be fully integrated in the official 1.7 tree.
- There are auto-detected build-dependencies which are stored in so called 'cache-files' during a 'reference build'.
- Building the whole thing on a cluster (speed up the build).
- ROCK Linux 1.7 is much easier to port than ROCK Linux 1.5.
- Many, many small improvements and cleanups.
StatusMost of the changes in the build-system core are already done, but some importand features are still missing (e.g. we didn't port our install-disks to 1.7 so far). Having 2.0 pre-releases on 19C3 is a realistic goal. Having a stable 2.0 release on 19C3 is optimistic, but not impossible.
(by Clifford Wolf)
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