[gentoo-installer] Status update

[Eric Sammer]

All:

I believe Donnie (spyderous) forwarded an email from me to this list 
about my laptop hard drive "issues" a few days ago. This has hindered 
much of my ability to communicate with the other devs or code in any 
meaningful fashion, as of late. It would seems as if I'm going to have 
to crawl all over HP to get them to do anything, so it will be some time 
before I'm 100% back in the game.

Current activity on the installer is a little thin. For those that do 
not know, we have only 2 primary coders other than myself - Nathaniel 
McCallum and Scott Myron. Nathaniel has recently been cramming with 
school work and starting a new job (congrats again, btw). Scott has also 
been tied up with university work. Some of our other regular 
contributors like Corey Shields are very likely waiting for the rest of 
us to get our stuff together. ;)

Last we left off, the partitioning code was giving Nathaniel a headache. 
Since we're still way-super-pre-alpha, we decided to TEMPORARILY forgo 
some of the arch compatibility and abstraction code. This should help us 
to get a functioning model out the door sooner and garner interest from 
other devs to lend a (coding) hand.

Scott has been rounding out some of the exist configuration code, xml 
parsing, deployment ideas, and utility methods.

I finished a working object notification system that should allow a 
network of objects to register to be "observers" of events of interest. 
Work on a "distributed" version of the notification center which will 
allow processes to communication across a network has started, but was 
halted due to HP's fabulous ventilation design of the Pavilion notebooks. :P

A number of people have expressed interested in either contributing a 
bit of code or becoming full on Gentoo devs to work on the installer. 
This is a good thing. We are interested in bringing on new devs to work 
on this project, but I just haven't gotten a chance to speak to any of 
them yet (you know who you are - I haven't forgotten you!).

I was in the process of putting together a completed TODO list and 
status with a time line, but that's all gone now (::waves to HP::). Like 
an idiot, I hadn't backed up recently so I have no one to blame but 
myself (::glares at HP anyway::). I will put these documents back 
together as soon as possible and I apologize for the delay.

I invite questions, contributions, flames, and other such things, as 
always. Feel free to email me or catch me on IRC (I'm trying to remain 
available but it's not easy) if you want to chat. I ask that everyone be 
patient, though; I'm quite busy at work and down my main box.

All the best to those in Gentoo installer land.
--
Eric Sammer
Gentoo Linux
http://www.gentoo.org

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