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I hacked together some outward-facing pages to at least start things rolling. I don’t think the wiki was even linked-to from any public place before my last Unity Linux blog post.
Based on what I’ve been reading in blogs and threads, there are some things I want to make sure are publicly clarified, specifically regarding what Unity Linux is, the composition its team, what it’s end goals are and a rough guess at how much work is left to be done.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Yes there is an actual LiveCD distribution that works. It’s just unreleased:
Booting with mklivecd. Hmm, too graphical for my tastes. Backgrounds are bloat!
This is the default desktop. Wait, what? It looks like TinyME because RPMs from TinyME were used to get a basic desktop up. But so far it sounds like Unity Linux will “ship” with no GUI at all.
To begin with, I started keeping lists of TODOs for the project. My lists aren’t official and I don’t control priorities, but it’s a place for me to write stuff down so that ideas don’t get lost. Whenever I hear of something interesting, I’ll make a note of it.
Spoiler
Actually, I don’t know who controls priorities. So far, development has been an agora of loose discussion, quick votes and people working with complete stewardship over their own stuff. Everyone’s been very agreeable.
Even I, with my extremely strong bias against anything non-MediaWiki don’t particularly care about the documentation being on DokuWiki. I say use whatever tool works, and once we’re done all the stuff that has to be done, I’d be fine with personally dealing with any aftermath of a bad decision. [it turns out they would go to MediaWiki after all]
Mind you, programmers can’t work like that for their stuff, and yet there have been no problems making long-term decisions. For example, bug trackers were bounced around recently. BugZilla, Mantis, and even the little-known Flyspray. Everyone’s been thinking in terms of “best tool for the job” and usability. No strong opinions on anything but needed features. No decision on a bug tracker yet, since it’s not so important right now. Everyone’s been pretty good about triaging their inbox and working on the important stuff first.
At any rate, this loose discussion and agreeable decision-making means that the developers can randomly mention all kinds of dreams and discuss just about anything, and they don’t have to worry about remembering things. I’ll just jot stuff down in a TODO somewhere. I will be reading most discussions unless they get too technical for me to want to deal with on an off day.
If any major decisions get made, the wiki will get updated. If I haven’t participated in the thread, someone will jab me. (get it, Jabber = jab, like Facebook pokes..)
An example of a major decision, and some actually-completed work:
What is that, and why are the developers so worked up over it? More info in the package tracker announcement.
I’m a little bit worried about keeping a decent changelog-type list, to mention actually-completed work. I’m not directly participating in the coding that’s been going on, so I’m a bit out of the loop on that stuff. I’ll be pressing for the developers to “show off” by talking about what they’ve accomplished to not just help team building and morale, but to also get that juicy knowledge to share out for the rest of you.
As an aside, the same concept of summarizing development activity ought to also be done with the forums. Maybe it’ll be newsletter-style, or maybe it’ll be blog postings. I’m sure that we’ll be maintaining some HOWTO, Tricks &Tips and similar sections in documentation, as the forum inspires us.
More updates will come as they trickle in. Stay tuned in here or on Planet Unity Linux [dead link]. Other news-related resources and proper summaries will be found either on the front page of the Unity Linux wiki or within the unofficial Unity Linux Current Plans page [dead link].
