[gentoo-installer] Installer update 2004-10-12

[Eric Sammer]

All:

Here's a quick update of installer status...

- There is a push to release a user testable version of the installer 
for the 2005.0 LiveCD. This is something we are currently working with 
(and will continue to work with) the RelEng folks to make happen. This 
is obviously contingent on even more hard work by not just the official 
Gentoo developers, but the unofficial ones as well (which is everyone 
else, in case you weren't catching the underlying statement). ;)

- Partitioning is still a headache, no two ways about it. A number of 
people are doing their own research into this topic, independently. This 
is good as different people have different ideas of how this should work 
and hopefully we'll be able to find what works faster this way. Thanks 
to those people working on this.

- Architecture support - a touchy subject to be sure. To clarify what 
people may or may not have heard, it's true: we're concentrating on the 
x86 version of the installer BUT this is because the current team is 
made up of people with primarily x86 experience. We are NOT giving up on 
other archs. What we are doing is trying to make the best of the 
resources we have. If you want to see the arch of your choice released 
sooner, we encourage you to get involved!

- There has been a lot of talk about Sun hardware and the size 
limitations on netboot images. Netbooting is a requirement for a lot of 
SPARC and MIPS based hardware so we need to find people who can do 
research and testing on a workable solution to getting SPARC / MIPS 
hardware to a point at which control can be passed to the installer on a 
live file system (similar to x86 hardware after booting from a cd). A 
number of other installers have worked around this (or made it work 
somehow) so we just need to find the proper resources to work through this.

- We need people with python experience to work on arch templates for 
specific architectures, review code, test, debug, improve, and document 
code. Get involved! Yea, I mean you.

- As always, we're looking for ways to improve what we have to make it 
more robust and flexible. Comments (that are respective and 
constructive) are invited and always welcome.

Anyone who is interested in getting involved may speak to me (esammer) 
or any of the following people in #gentoo-installer (freenode): klieber, 
spyderous, tseng, samyron, codeman, or npmccallum. Those of you who 
aren't Gentoo devs can look over the code from the ViewCVS interface 
(see gentoo.org) in the gentoo/src/installer directory.

Regards.
-- 
E. Sammer
esammer@g.o
Gentoo Linux - http://www.gentoo.org