Things are starting to look really nice now, cooker activity seems to have gotten back to previous levels and even then some and interest from new contributors seems to have increased as well, really nice to see!
Also one of my favourite news is Eugeni Dodonov now being appointed cooker project leader, being one of my favs since ever I had my first chats with him, I knew he was *the* right guy that Mandriva *desperatly* needed and had been in lack of for the last three years now, awesome, Eugeni has done a great job so far and is proving himself to exceed new expectations everyday being proactive and being really good at discussing and listening to input and technical matters and suggestions. For me, this is awesome as I personally have been missing this all the time since Flepied, Warly & Gwenole left us *sigh*.
Beyond that, the defintive most interesting and “controversial”/intrusive thing of my biggest focus these days is taking over rpm maintenance and now working with great assistance from Jeff & Ric on preparing and getting the final bits and pieces in place for getting some of the biggest and neatest changes wrt. rpm in Mandriva since probably forever, not only technically, but community-wise, influence, r&d and simply being able to make packaging way easier and maintenance work way less demanding. A lot of new things will now come now that we’re not only maintaining obsolete versions of rpm with no interaction and participation in upstream, but we actually help drive it now and will be able to satisfy more user requests, distro interest, credibility and more. In the end, I think we will end up being able to be the awesome alternative in the forked world, hoping for interest of other distros, actively inviting their participation and offering to help merge, clean up and help them adapt and get onboard and satisfy their requests as well..
I’ll be joining Mandiva again within a short period to work on rpm, urpmi and git with cross-distro collaboration in mind now as well. So things are certainly gonna be happening from now on!
I expect to upload a new release of rpm5 to main/testing by tomorrow hopefully ironing out the last remaining rpmdb conversion issues and related, then ported the few remaining rpm related packages requiring so (perl-URPM has already been rewritten to pure rpm5 native api, with a lot of refactorization, improvements++, even caixa’s apt branch has gone through much of the same for rpm5 now ;).
If everything goes to plan, I hope for rpm5 to hit main/release by the end of next week with less rough introduction this time than as was the case for main/testing earlier.. (thx to rindolf and especially Ric for patience, helpfulness and eagerness in helping out in the process, some day later I¨lll make it wortwhile in one way or the other! ;).
I’m curious about what stance Mageia will take on this though, I’m certainly hoping they will adopt our work and allow for us to help them and contribute back and forth, if not I fear they’ll miss out on several changes in just perl-URPM done recently during rpm5 rewrite, and even more so those planned when rpm5 upgrade situtation settles..
Oh well, just thought I’d give an update, I’m more excited about the situation of cooker and copmany than I’ve been for ages, I just hope the same will rub on to others as well! :D
