Saturday, June 4, 2011

Revision 10 and what to do before LFScript 4 goes stable

LFScript 4 revision 10 will be released in a few minutes.
It contains a few bugfixes, it makes the build of Gnome more stable and scripts for VLC media player and OpenJDK are now ready for use.

'TODO' overview
The short version of what is left to do is: Make sure that LFScript 4 contains
everything that was in LFScript 3.3 and a proper fsOS2 Live CD (or DVD) can be
produced for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

The rest of this blog post will explain what is exactly on my 'TODO' list before I will declare LFScript 4 as "stable" and it will get version number 1.0 (it is now version 0.7). Note that I may release a few more revisions before this happens.

Numbers in this article (like #766168) refer to bug entries in Launchpad
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/lfscript). It is there that you can check the status
for each item on this list. When all bugs have been fixed, 1.0 will be released.

Make sure everything in Gnome works perfectly
At this moment (revision 10) Gnome will compile without problems, but at run time there are still some minor problems:
  • GDM will not allow you to login (it does not display a list of users or user/password text fields), nor will it allow you to reboot or shutdown, making it pretty useless (#792918).
  • If GDM is run at boot (as the default display manager), it will block the initialization of text mode logins, making it impossible to login in any way (#792919).
  • The Gnome menu editor will not work if PyGTK is not installed. PyGTK is currently not a dependency of any Gnome script (#792920).

Some additional software should also be included, in particular Gnome-Media (to allow volume control in Gnome) and GParted (partitioning software) (#792921).

Other issues
There are also still some minor problems with non-gnome scripts;
  • Firefox does not link to the Java plugin if OpenJDK is installed (#792925).
  • Firefox does not have an entry in the Gnome applications menu (#792927).
There are also some things which are still to be implemented for a Live CD:
  • A live CD should be ejected before shutdown or reboot (#792928).
  • The live CD should start with the console linked to a framebuffer device (this will allow Tux to present itself at boot and provide better color support for text-mode applications). The script 'init.sh' does not create a framebuffer device file (#792930).

Add remaining scripts from LFScript 3.3 (#766168)
Scripts which were available in LFScript 3.3, but still need to be updated for use in LFScript 4:
  • Xfce additional software (beyond xfce-core)
  • KDE additional software (beyond kdebase)
  • Gnome runtime requirements (consolekit, pygtk)
  • Gnome additional software (a few have already been included in LFScript 4, but not all)
  • Thunderbird
  • A nice theme (I used 'candido' in LFScript 3, but maybe fsos2 should have something new)
  • Extra fonts

Written documentation (#792932)
Because LFScript 4 has had quite a few changes recently, I've deliberately neglected to keep the documentation up to date (with the exception of the video tutorials). After all, what's the point in writing extensive documentation for features that will change or be dropped shortly after. But now, I feel that it's time to write some complete and properly formatted (as in: not only in plain text, maybe in docbook) documentation.

Merge scripts into ScriptFactory (#792933)
My latest revisions have been about implementing scripts, and not about preserving the differences to be applied in later versions of LFS and BLFS. Most people do not use ScriptFactory at all (and may even think "What the hell is ScriptFactory?") so this is only a minor issue. But it is something that needs to be done for a 1.0 release.

Did I miss something?
It's possible I'll uncover some other minor issues in the time before I release 1.0, in which case I'll file a bug on it at Launchpad.

The bug reporting tool is open for everyone with Launchpad account (which you can get for free). So, if something is missing from this list and also not yet reported on Launchpad (see link at the top of this post) feel free to report it.