Free Software Linux

Gentoo seems to be having problems with .”1” releases – 2007.1 was cancelled and now 2008.1 has been cancelled. The Gentoo project has also announced a desire to move to a more “back to basics approach” where they are doing weekly builds of Gentoo stages. Good idea. As many of you know, I am already building fresh stages for x86, i686, athlon-xp, pentium4, core32, amd64, core64, ~x86 and ~amd64 as well as OpenVZ templates at http://www.funtoo.org/linux. Since I’ve been building Gentoo stages for a while, I know that Gentoo’s catalyst tool (the tool that is used for Gentoo releases) is in poor shape – it has been poorly maintained over the years and also does not have any documentation, so it is not really up to the task of building Gentoo releases anymore. The lack of catalyst documentation makes it much more difficult for others (like Gentoo users and other Gentoo-based projects) to build their own Gentoo releases, and this, along with the poor state of catalyst itself, tends to perpetuate the centralized Gentoo development model – a model that is not very efficient and also isn’t very much fun. It is a shame (and somewhat ironic) that a well-renowned build-from-source distribution does not have a decent and well-maintained release building tool. So it’s time to fix this… In a few weeks, I will be releasing a completely redesigned release build tool called “Metro”. This is the tool that I use to build my daily Funtoo stages and supports building both stable and unstable (~) stages. It is much more capable than catalyst and has a much better architecture. Metro is a full recipe-based build engine that will allow the larger Gentoo community to build Gentoo (and even non-Gentoo - it is  not Gentoo-specific) releases and stages easily and share their build recipes with others. Metro allows anyone to set up their own automated builds and greatly simplifies the task of maintaining a web mirror of these builds. It will make it a lot easier for people to create their own Gentoo-based distributions as well. My focus is on empowering the larger Gentoo community, but I do hope that the official Gentoo project will use Metro for their release engineering efforts – I think it will help not only the Gentoo project but also facilitate collaboration with projects outside Gentoo (by sharing build recipies) and thus help Gentoo to move in more of a distributed direction and innovate more quickly. It’s time to get Gentoo back to being the leaders of innovation in the world of Linux. I am currently finalizing some interfaces in Metro before I start writing documentation for the tool. Once documentation is done (should be in a couple of weeks,) I will be releasing Metro to the public. Until then, you can enjoy the fruits of Metro by using my Funtoo stages at http://www.funtoo.org/linux . :-)

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