Hello. Due to recent events and things that have been going on we have
neglected the much needed work on Devuan Ascii. With this email I would
like to strike up some work being done and make a new proposal regarding
Ascii and Beowulf. Ideally, if we reach an agreement within the
following points, we should try and work burst-mode and get this done as
soon as possible.

Personally I am very worried with the amount of time we are behind
Debian, meaning that our "testing" is equal to (already frozen for a
year+) Debian's "stable". This is a thing that needs to be swiftly
addressed and we need to catch up with Debian by providing Beowulf being
our "testing", moving Ascii to "stable", and finally Jessie to
"oldstable".

So, saying this, let's move on to my proposal:

Due to the streamlining from expetimental->unstable->testing->stable not
yet being ready, to catch up with Debian we should probably release
Ascii the same way we did with Jessie. With Jessie we haven't made a
patch release (e.g. 1.0.1 or 1.1.0) since the initial 1.0.0 release.
IMHO we can leave it like that, but with Ascii we can do these if
necessary. What I find more important is the streamlining work so we can
be on track with Debian and keep going on with testing and development
on Ceres and Beowulf - rather than losing time and nerves with Jessie
and Ascii.

The Ascii roadmap I wrote after the release of Jessie hasn't received
much love and not much progress has been made on it, so with this email
I will render it obsolete and try getting the points below finished.
These should be about enough to make a 2.0.0 release, and later on, if
really needed, we can make 2.1.0 and others.


General status
--------------

    * outdated packages in Ascii: http://sprunge.us/AIeF

        These packages might and might not need updates, but we should
        figure out if there is some necessary releases to be done
        regarding security.

    * libsystemd packages in Ascii: http://sprunge.us/cfAW

        These packages shouldn't have to be forked at this point, since
        the library doesn't do anything if systemd is not there.

    * banned packages in Ascii: http://sprunge.us/ALPE

        These packages look fine, and should not need touching.

Init
----

sysvinit is still working fine in Ascii. I would propose keeping it this
way, and looking at OpenRC for Ceres first, and then Beowulf.

Udev
----

We should try and push eudev as the default hotplugging daemon. It has
been working perfectly stable for a while now. Currently it's still in
the experimental repos.


syslog
------

rsyslog still isn't being built properly for Ascii. This breaks default
debootstrap and locks the Jessie version if a dist-upgrade is being
done. Should we try fixing the rsyslog package or forcing a different
daemon like syslog-ng?

Xorg
----

Xorg still seems to work if we use the "xserver-xorg-legacy" package. It
requires a hack being put in Xwrapper.config that makes it mandatorily
run as root if no login manager is present. If a login manager like slim
or lightdm are present, it should work just fine.


Amprolla
--------

We need to finish the new Amprolla setup and force it as the new main
package mirror. Amprolla3 is merging ascii-updates and ascii-security,
which should need no tweaking and should keep working as-is. It has been
tested and proven working multiple times, even before deploying it on
the Devuan infrastructure. This action point implies fixing and pushing
an update to devuan-keyring as well.


Conclusion
----------

Unfortunately, due to the timespan, I feel like these are the only
points we should address for this 2.0.0 Ascii release. Again, the reason
for this (somewhat radical) approach is to catch up with Debian and not
be two years behind. This allows us to keep being a competitor and gives
newcomers expected behavior and not two-year-old packages.


Please, let me know your thoughts and criticisms and let's discuss this
in a polite way.

Thank you.

--
~ parazyd
GnuPG: 03337671FDE75BB6A85EC91FB876CB44FA1B0274
GnuPG: https://parazyd.cf/FA1B0274.asc