Status of the development

Posted by: mstauber Category: Development

A few months have passed since the last news in the development section of the webpage have been posted. Time to sum up what we have done in between.

As some readers of the mailing list know, I've been involved in a sort of different project since August 2010: I bought an old house built around 1902 and started to renovate it and to add an extension building for more space. That project is now two months shy of its completion. Then again, a house is like an open source project: It's never really fully finished and there is always something to finish, to change or to improve.

During the period that I worked on the house, the development activity on the CentOS6 aspect of BlueOnyx winded down and eventually almost hibernated. Most of the groundwork has been finished and large parts of BlueOnyx are now CentOS6 ready.

The remaining open tasks involve the planned Postfix and Mailman support, making CMU and shell-tools CentOS6 ready and wrapping up all the loose ends that dangle out of the CD's jewel case when we try to burn it all to a fully working ISO image.

We don't know when CentOS6 will be released, but it's probably not that far away. Which would then in turn force us to a hell-bent-for-leather mad end rush to finish the Postfix support that we wanted to integrate into BlueOnyx on CentOS6.

So the more I think about it, the more likely it will be that we will keep Sendmail for a while longer. Don't get me wrong: I love Postfix. But I also feel that the new base-email.mod that deals with Postfix support simply lacks the needed maturity.

The first one or two builds of BlueOnyx on CentOS6 will most likely contain enough little "surprises" and minor headaches as is. Like it's always the case with a new release on a fresh and new OS. Hence I'd rather save us all a major support headache, because I am sure that after the initial release the mailing list will burst out of its seams with Postfix related questions.

Other than that: As you know, CentOS-5.6 has been released recently. It provided us with some small surprises as well, mostly in the form of things that broke during the YUM update. I really have to resist to dash off on a mad rant about why RH and ultimately CentOS found it wise to change the GID of /etc/httpd/alias/*.db with the updated mod_nss during a minor version OS upgrade. Especially in a way that it would fubar thousands of boxes worldwide. And with that I don't only mean BlueOnyx boxes, but also "plain" CentOS5 installs. But hey, I promised not to rant. ;o)

Lastly: An updated BlueOnyx-5.6 ISO image has been released today, containing all fixes and updates as of today. It also has the new proftpd-1.3.3e that can be found in the blueonyx-testing YUM repository. The updated proftpd was necessary, as the previous one works fine if installed via YUM, but the %pre and %post-install scripts wouldn't work during a CD based install.

During the easter holidays some more coding for BlueOnyx on CentOS6 will get done and I hope to make some good leeway with the Mailman integration.


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Apr 20, 2011 Category: Development Posted by: mstauber
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