[WBEL-devel] WBEL4 progress update

[John Morris]

Ok, been having some luck with WBEL4 and figured it was time to post an
update and ask a couple of questions.

Status:

Up until now everything has been happening in chroot trees but yesterday
was 'first burn' on a very rough copy.  It installs but still has a lot
of trademark issues, etc.  As usual I assume that simple text and
graphics changes are the easy part so didn't get in as big a rush on
that part.

Going a little farther on the trademark thing this time, unless
something crops up and forces a change, no package will have 'redhat' in
the name.  Of course some will provide a virtual package with redhat in
the name to avoid ripping into hundreds of packages.

Naming this one just 4 instead of 4.0 to better match RH and hopefully
make install scripts that parse /etc/redhat-release work better.  Like
last time there won't BE a /etc/redhat-release on the pre-releases to
shake out any packages that depend on that file in the main distro but
for the final release the lines to make it will get uncommented.

Changes that might be an issue (now is probably the time for feedback)
are:

1.  redhat-rpm-config is now whitebox-rpm-config.  For real, as in
/usr/lib/rpm/redhat/ is now /usr/lib/rpm/whitebox.  Will want some wider
testing on this to be sure everything is still happy although the system
can still build all of it's packages without a problem.

2.  redhat-menus is now system-menus but because so many packages are
hardwired to a directory named redhat the inside directory structure has
been left unchanged.  Which is why it is system-menus and not
whitebox-menus, figured it might be confusing to have a package named
whitebox containing only a directory named redhat and a bunch of files
with redhat prefixes.

3.  redhat-ldb is now whitebox-lsb, this one has been fully converted
since by the nature of the whole lsb idea it shouldn't matter so long as
the provided lsb scripts know where things are.

4.  redhat-logos and redhat-artwork haven't been been changed yet but
will be soon.

5.  The directory on the install media is now /WhiteBox instead of
/RedHat.

Release plan:

My current thinking is now that 4 has actually booted to quickly attack
the artwork by looking back in the mail spool for some of the user
contributed art and/or just copying over the art from 3.0 to get
something releasable posted for BT by next week.  Then I'm off to get
hitched/honeymoon/etc for a week starting Apr 2.  When I get back I'll
catch up the mail and start patching the bugs that have been located
while I was off having fun.  :)

And now some questions for those with access to RHEL4.

Does rhythmbox fail to run on shipping copies until you open a shell and
run gst-config?

Did RH have a real JDK installed when building or do they use gcj like
FC3 did?  Even better question is how does one determine that? And if
so, are there any clues as to which one?  Seeing as they included the
IBM one in 3's Extras CD I'd guess they didn't switch, but the big Q is
did they even have one installed at all?

When I drop a pre-release, which format would be preferred?  Choice #1
is the usual pair of torrents with binary and source.  Choice #2 is a
single DVD image.  Guess it depends whether anyone thinks they want to
look at the srpms at this stage.

Which leads into the next logical question.  What format(s) are
desirable for the final release?  I can see where both have their place,
especially now at four+four CDs but I also want to keep the footprint on
the mirrors low.

Is there anyone reading this that would want to install the x86_64 port
yet lacks a way to burn a DVD or has a target machine lacking a DVD
drive?  Assuming the answer to both is no, but assuming that there still
are a lot of i386 servers lacking DVD drives, how about i386 release on
CD only and x86_64 DVD only?

Another option might be to eliminate the source CDs and force anyone
wanting source to get the DVD image, which would help the storage
situation a little bit by only duplicating the binaries.

And finally a data dump:

Here are the packages currently modified:

anaconda
anaconda-product
comps
httpd
initscripts
kernel
mkinitrd
NetworkManager
rhn-applet
rpm
rpmdb-whitebox
specspo
sysreport
system-menus
whitebox-lsb
whitebox-release
whitebox-rpm-config
xscreensaver

And here is my TODO list:

anaconda-product (a little more tinkering)
comps  (merge desktop & server lists into unified comps.xml)
firefox (fixup default links)
indexhtml (rewrite)
mozilla (fixup default links)
redhat-artwork (rework)
redhat-logos (remake as whitebox-logos)
squirrelmail (trademark removal)
tora (install oracle & rebuild)
up2date (trademark removal, menu icon)
whitebox-release (x86_64 docs, yum repo config)

build the x86_64 port

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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