European Wafaa

If anyone has been following my tweets/dents, you will have noticed that I sporadically mention something about "Operation Factory" followed by a pile of tags.  Well for the curious, Operation Factory is basically getting the latest and greatest Moblin into openSUSE.

Basically the process involves the following:

• Get the latest code from the Novell internal Build Service, and import it into the OBS.
• Rebase all the patches and tag them
• Upstream as many patches as possible
• Get as many patches as possible into openSUSE
• Use as many in distro packages as possible
• Put Moblin specific packages in their own devel project on the OBS

OK so that doesn't look too bad now does it? Not entirely no, apart from the fact that my employer doesn't really want to know about what I'm doing and as such would much rather I spend my time doing annoying/boring/beneficial to shareholders work :-( (that's my obligatory moan out of the way).

Michael managed to architect a good plan on how to actually start getting things moving with the help from Aaron and others (I might have stuck my oar in just to feel involved :-) )

Vincent was kind enough to import from the IBS to the OBS, and started linking to distro packages.  I have pretty much linked all the remaining packages that could be with ease (as in there were no patches or differences).

Federico has done a lot of work tagging and highlighting patches that need to be sent upstream/included into openSUSE over in the wiki.  Problem is that he has other critical priorities (like fixing bugs/work beneficial to shareholders/etc) which means he hasn't been able to go through the whole list of packages.  So that means that I or anyone else needs to do the work on the Still ToDo part of the list.  I have started to merge the identified and "cleaned" packages, I still have a way to go but I'm hoping I can juggle things a bit so that I can at least finish that part of the list.

Another thing that needs to be done, is get all the Moblin specific packages submitted to their own devel project before they can be sent into Factory.  We have a devel home ready, it's just a matter of going through all the packages and sr'ing them there.

I have commented on the wiki against the packages that I have linked, patches upstreamed etc. to make it easier for people who may want to join in the fun (just incase no one noticed, that was a hint!).  Basically the repository setup is like this:

• Moblin:2.2 is the new home for building Moblin.  This will effectively be an aggregate for the different devel components.  This is also the repository that will provide the base to build the images for people to install (no I don't have a date for when these will be available yet).  It is also the home for packages that can't get merged into Factory due to too many patches or weird tweaks should there be any.
• Moblin:UI is the new devel project for the Moblin specific components.  This is where things like moblkin-panel-web etc. will live, and where they will be worked on prior to being sr'ed up to Factory. 
• All the other packages should be in distro, so the maintenece aspect of things should be much simpler unlike now.

The keen eyed among you will have noticed the name of the aggregate repo - yes it will house the new release once we have merged everything.  We are starting off with 2.1 and then we can easily see diffs etc between versions when they are submitted.

So all in all things are moving in a positive manner, just not as quickly as I would have liked.  If you are disappointed in the speed at which things are progressing pop into irc or send a mail to the mailing list (make sure you subscribe first).  Please do get involved!  There is lots of useful work for people to do, and importantly lots of fun to be had :-)