Some movement @ Mandriva

[rolf]

Eugeni Dodonov had this to say @ cooker et al:

Hello folks,

as I promised a couple of days before, I finally have some official news
from Mandriva to announce.

As you perhaps have already seen at [1] (or [2], or maybe [3]), from now
on I will be the one responsible for the desktop distribution. I guess I
don't need to introduce myself - since I started at Mandriva almost
exactly 2 years ago, I've been constantly around on the mailing lists
and on the Planet Mandriva, so I can only say that it is a very big
honor for me to be responsible for this task now!

As for the next steps for the Mandriva distribution development, they
will be defined and carried out in the next few weeks. I know better
than anyone how hard these tasks will be, but as one of my favorite
proverbs say, "A journey of a thousand li starts with a single step". I
know that right now the build system has its issues, the maintainership
of our packages is quite chaotic, many packages have unsolved issues and
the overall landscape is, well, messy. But no task is impossible to
solve having the will to do so, and I am more than certain that we will
be able to overcome all those issues, starting now.

And as I always do, I'll try to do my best to keep you updated on what
is going on.

But what I can say is that it has been a long, long time of turbulence
in Mandriva land, but I believe that this turbulence is finally coming
to an end.

Best regards to you all,
Eugeni

[1] http://blog.mandriva.com/2010/11/05/new ... r-manager/
[2]
http://blog.mandriva.com/fr/2010/11/05/ ... va-cooker/
[3]
http://blog.mandriva.com/br/2010/11/05/ ... -mandriva/

-- Eugeni Dodonov

[viking60]

Interesting. I wish him all the best, and even if cooker is in a tough spot I have no complaints about my 64bit Free/Powerpack installation.

[rolf]

I've noticed the stream of (mostly) security and (some) bugfix updates seems undiminished through all this and hope the Mandrake seed will continue.

[viking60]

Hey is Mandriva going Bananas? This is almost to much information to take in The release date is set to December 22 for 2010.2
And they will have 2011 ready in may. Looks like things are OK over at Mandriva so far. December is going to be exiting because I believe Mageia has promised us something then too.

Hello folks,

After long period of silence, I am pleased to give you some official
news from Mandriva about the next Mandriva version. And, to compensate
for all the time without news and announcements, I give you *two*
releases at once.

Yes, you read it right. In the coming months, not one, but two Mandriva
releases will be released!

First, we will release Mandriva 2010.2 [1], with estimated release date
of December 22, as a Christmas gift for you all. Mandriva 2010.2 is a
refreshed look at our latest release, Mandriva 2010.1, plus all the
security and bugfix updates which were done after its release, plus also
lots of improvements, stability and performance fixes in many, many
packages.

And, besides Mandriva 2010.2, of course, time has come to announce the
Mandriva 2011 release [2]. The Mandriva 2011 release will be done
according to the following schedule:

- Mandriva 2011 Alpha: January 31 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Beta 1: February 28 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Beta 2: March 28 2011
- Mandriva 2011 RC: April 25 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Final: May 30 2011

Starting with Mandriva 2011 release, the release policy for Mandriva
will change to 1 release per year. This will allow us to develop even
greater releases, and - of course - will give us more time to test,
validate and further improve the overall quality of the release.

The technical specifications and detailed features of Mandriva 2011 will
be announced and discussed soon, and the hard - and interesting - work
will begin.

As I promised in my previous email, more news will come soon. So stay tuned!

[1] http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2010.2_Development
[2] http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2011_Development

--
Eugeni Dodonov

[dedanna1029]

Wow. They are moving on it! 2011 Alpha already in January, just over a month after the 2010.2 release!

[rolf]

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Mageia can publish. 2010.2 seems like it would not bring much for me to try, as I'm running Spring with all the official updates plus the dynamically updated (by John Balcaen) KDE 4.5.3 and quite a few of MIB's backports. In either case, the past has shown schedules to be a bit optimistic. How Mandriva produces on the forecasts by Eugeni and Arnaud will be something to watch.

[viking60]

I think they probably will keep the time schedule this time. Mainly due to the fact that Mageia is due for a version. But Mageia is a PR disaster too. They do not want a forum (so it seems anyway) and the mailing lists are "spam" without sensible filtering alternatives (all mailing lists are - not only Mageia's). So I removed them to spare my mailbox. Once that is done I have no clue how Mageia is doing. But it seems to "work" as a motivation for Mandriva and that is good. I am curious about Mageia too, so I will be looking forward to testing it. I guess we will get the traditional distrowatch announcement. Mageia had a lot of goodwill to begin with - including mine - and I translated Mageias Norwegian start page. And then.. It kind of stopped a bit. I am sure they are developing, but I have no info or status on how it is going. The German's seem to be the most exited about Mageia. Well, they have their own forum so it is possible to tell anyway Kaizer Wobo is dynamically directing his troops towards Mageia, and he has made his preferences clear. They are not abandoning Mandriva though. What others think of Mageia, I simply don't know.

All in all I think they need a forum in order to communicate with potential users. That "loyalty" thing is wearing off now, and no one cares who sucked the most and who fired who etc. etc. Now the distro has to do the speaking - as it should be! I see prophylactic attempts to prepare the users for a bad distro with statements like: You cannot expect too much it has only "just started", "infrastructure", "badly treated people out of work " etc.. I guess it is OK to play those cards, but they will not last very long. Wobo makes it clear that you cannot lean back and await what is offered to you. You have to participate (I have the impression that many Germans do too). The problem with that line of argumentation is of course Ubuntu, Suse, Mint, and all the other distros where you actually can lean back and see what is offered to you. Oh yes - I can feel the moral indignation already but it is kind of true. At the moment I have a feeling (no facts!) that Mandriva will have the greatest chance of prevailing.

[rolf]

Nice essay! I get the Mageia-discuss Digest and, yes, it's pretty chaotic. There's much energy, expression of heretofore pent-up wild theories and fantasies, but the bulk of whatever amounts to actual progress must be going on behind the scenes viewed from my window, something like the way Cooker is formally/informally more restrictive about the quality of participation.

That Mandriva seems to have, still, some capital backing, in a world where FOSS distros struggle to find a paradigm suggests to me they are in a bit stronger position to succeed. I hope there will be success and progress for either or both struggling developments.

(p.s. Here, I need to shrink my pictures so that width is =< what the forum software makes for the picture window, or right side gets truncated, as in what I see of your diagram.)

[viking60]

Yeah the diagram was a bit over the top there I hope they both (Mandriva/Mageia) make it, and probably they would both gain by cooperating a bit.

[jkerr82508]

There will be a Mageia forum once the necessary infrastructure is in place.

You can read the Mageia mailing lists in a forum format:

http://mageia.linuxtech.net/forum/

You can follow the "behind the scenes" work in the Sysadm ML on that forum, and the "founders" meetings in the wiki:

http://www.mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=meetings

Jim

[viking60]

Thanks!
That "forum" will serve the information purposes I guess. Sad that I have to accept thousands of mails to contribute. That is no acceptable option to me.
Looks like there is something going on there though.

[dedanna1029]

Sad that I have to accept thousands of mails to contribute. That is no acceptable option to me.

The main reason I never subscribed to the Cooker ML, but rather read it online.