Mageia Blog (English)

After the announcement of LibreOffice, Mageia decided to give full official support to this new project.

There are obvious similarities between the histories of Mageia and LibreOffice. Because both projects futures were unclear, teams decided – in both projects respectively – to create a fork that respects the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) principles and sets a more predictable governance model that relies on its community.

We believe LibreOffice will be a great success for developers and users alike and that it will provide full and efficient document-processing applications based on open standards.

We look forward to packaging, and contributing to the LibreOffice project and we will provide it in the upcoming Mageia releases.

Here is the latest news from the front:

• Buildsystem: after the installation of the servers in the ielo.net datacenter, hard work has started on the  buildsystem installation and configuration. The sysadm team is basing the new infrastructure for now on Mandriva Linux one, adding lots of cleaning and improvements. Puppet is the main software used to centralize the administration and Misc is working on writing all the needed script for the Mageia environment. Together with lots of bug fixes and improvements, iurt is now installed on build nodes (thanks Blino!). Iurt is a recompilation bot which monitors lists of packages of different architectures and recompiles each package in a separate clean chroot each time it is needed.
  At the same time, Buchan installed and configured the LDAP server. It will provide the Mageia centralized authentication together with a directory used for all the Mageia applications. CatDap will be a very easy to use GUI, developed with Catalyst. It will allow users to register a Mageia account, ask for various applications access (mailing-lists, bugzilla, forums…), modify it at any time with a click. CatDap is now installed and tests are in progress. The other big work is about Subversion. Tests are in progress for importing packages so that it can be all ready for first submissions. More news soon :). Scheduler has also been installed and work will start soon on repsys, the package submission tool.
• Blog and web site: a dedicated virtual machine will be used to host the blog and the web site for Mageia (thanks again to Gandi). They will be migrated soon as they are still hosted on PLF servers (thanks again to the PLF guys).
• Mirrors: on the mirrors side, we have a second primary mirror ready to sync Mageia, Ibiblio, together with Jussieu. Olivier (aka Nanar) has finalized the first online version for the mirrors management application. You can now propose a mirror to be added to the official list of Mageia mirrors, check for an existing one and even have a look at the Mageia mirrors map. Still some work to do to plug it with urpmi, some cleaning, improvements… Stay tuned!
• Mageia wiki: work is in progress to setup the permanent Mageia wiki. Technical specifications have been collected here to choose the most suitable solution. We used also wikimatrix to work on functionalities. Mediawiki is the most favourable candidate so far. Thomas Canniot gave a big hand on wiki structure.
• Roadmap and specifications: as a reminder, you will find the first roadmap and specifications in the wiki, it should answer main questions about the next six months.
• Logo and design: as said in a previous post, the deadline for logo proposals, which should follow the Mageia artwork guidelines, is Nov. 9th 2010 (coming Tuesday!). Work has been launched in artwork team to provide Mageia with its own set of icons as many will be used especially in configuration tools.
• mageia-app-db: Samuel Verschelde (aka Stormi) will contribute to Mageia by proposing a new tool for packages dedicated to end users (more information: first document, first specifications. It has been announced on the mageia-discuss mailing-list. Samuel listed the main features. It will allow to browse the package database and provide the main informations about packages. It focuses also on interaction between users, testers and packagers (backports requests and voting, new package requests and voting, package testing requests (i.e. packagers asking users to test a certain package before pushing it to the official repositories). Finally its customisable user notifications on your home page, RSS feed or e-mail (new backports available of your favourite software, new update candidates available and awaiting testing… etc.)

If you want to contribute to any of these projects, you can contact us via the Mageia mailing-lists: translation, web design, development, tests… etc, you are very welcome!