Something Resembling a Roadmap

[Mike Barnes]

Carmen is getting discontinued fairly soon. Its purpose has been
served, which was to be a base to build an actual distribution on.
Last night, I installed a new system from scratch off a set of CDs. It
ran pretty much perfectly, and booted up at the end of it. Haven't
gone much further than that, but it's looking promising. We have a
test release.

The new build, which actually identifies itself as "Alpha Core"
instead of "Fedora Core", is Juni (yes, still on the Spy Kids binge -
blame my daughter). It's mostly the same as Carmen, but with all the
updates and a couple of extra packages. A few have been dropped, due
to dependency issues. They may or may not be worked back in.

I'll be snail-mailing CD sets to a few people with bandwidth in the
next day or so, and we'll get the test images available as soon as
possible. A few notes on the release follow.

1) Upgrades from RedHat 7.2 are not supported. Clean install, or nothing.

2) Upgrades from the "Carmen" release may work, but should be done via
yum, once we've got things hosted somewhere. The packages are about
95% identical.

3) This is an interim release. It's versioned at 0.9 and should be
treated as if even putting the CD _near_ a computer will blow up your
house.

The vague, and subject to revision, roadmap is below. Nothing is dated
yet, since it's all dependent on free time being available. There's
some scope left in the version numbers ofr  afew releases before 1.0,
but I don't think it'll go that far.

0.90 (Juni): Installable ISO version. Based on Carmen tree, mostly
identical. We're at this point now. Interim release to test on a
variety of hardware.

0.91: Proper shakedown after initial release. Test to make sure
upgrades from previous distributions can work, tweak where necessary
based on issues reported on 0.90. Finalise package list additions and
removals. Define the distribution. Remove Fedora-sepcific artwork and
references.

0.92: Released when self-hosting - the entire distribution will be
rebuilt under itself. Will include EV6, and possibly EV67 optimised
packages for glibc and openssl. Update most packages to Fedora Core 3
release equivalents.

1.0: I can dream, can't I?