Behind the Scenes
Some of the Source Mage developers were nice enough to inform me about some of the projects they are working on lately.
Jaka Kranjc plans to continue work on a new quill feature, which is currently only available in a git version. It allows for spells to be almost automatically converted to use upstream gpg methods of authentication. As long as the signatures are provided. He is also planning to help with getting Sorcery 1.14 into test stage.
Martin Spitzbarth is working on the asterisk and asterisk-addons spells. Asterisk is a complete IP telephony platform for business and is open source. You can find more information about Asterisk at http://www.asterisk.org. Martin goes on to say:
“A rework of its CONFIGURE is on my todo list to make some use of asterisk’s features that are normally only accessible by a “make menuconfig”-style menu *after* ./configure. And the choices presented by this menu are dependend on the DEPENDS. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit too well into the way sorcery handles spells.”
Thomas “sobukus” Orgis plans to complete the port to Alpha architecture with an install ISO. He has working installations, it’s just the ISO that is missing. The other major project on his list is to rework the handling of system accounts. He explains it like this:
“The used numerical IDs for system user/group accounts should at least be user-configurable to accomodate local site requirements. Another point is to make casts into a to-be chroot (with INSTALL_ROOT) independent of the host system’s user database (including: leaving host accounts untouched!). Besides that, a future goal is to include Sorcery/spell support for cross-compiling a whole system for a different architecture.”
Eric Sandall is working on getting OpenOffice 2.2.1 to build. He is adding Second Life to the games available in Source Mage. He mentioned it will take a lot of manual work to get it working correctly. He is trying to package ZFS too. I’m sure you have noticed he is busy staying on top of Source Mage stable releases as well. He just released the new stable-rc-0.12 for testing.
All of the developers will be spending time triaging and destroying bugs. Please keep checking Mage Power to get the latest news on Source Mage projects.