Is Arch falling behind?

Question

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 0.4 for the i686 and x86_64 architectures, our fourth stable release.
A short and incomplete list of changes since 0.4rc2-i686:
* Updates:
o Update to Linux 2.6.16
o Update to GNOME 2.14
o Update to OpenOffice.org 2.0.2.1
o Lots of minor bugfixes
o Create a howto about upgrading from the previous stable release
* A few statistics since 0.3:
o 4186 changes
o 732 new packages
o 302 fixed bugs
* For who haven't followed the changes in the pre/rc releases, the most important changes:
o Implemented fwcpan, a new tool to install any cpan module, just like it would when you install it with pacman.
o Split OpenOffice, now all language packs and dictionaries can be installed/removed separately.
o Libificated pacman to meet our needs, and the newborn pacman 3 has become the default package manager.
o Network configuration has been redesigned, now we support various network profiles, and many more network parameters (hardware address, multiple ip addresses on a single interface, etc) than before.
o Created a new, more verbose documentation.
o Switched to udev as the default hotplug multiplexer.
o Bugfix: now automounting for usb sticks works fine, not only for CDs or DVDs.
o Added package splitting support.
o Started to work on a PPC port.
o Rewritten setup from scratch in C. The new framework will allow to implement a graphical installer, too.
o The init script system was redesigned: more user-friendly error messages, now uses gettext for translations.
o Modularized Xorg 7.0, Apache 2.2.0, KDE 3.5.1, Firefox 1.5.0.1, Thunderbird 1.5
Please refer to the Frugalware Stable ChangeLog for more information.
Download for i686: netinstall (19M), cd1 (490M), cd2 (604M), dvd (3.5G)
Download for x86_64: netinstall (19M), dvd (2.5G)
Torrents also available.
SHA1SUMS:
dfec06c393187037a362f4d2e57819c4e97e71dd frugalware-0.4-i686-cd1.iso
09c29ec582eadc02dee2be0fd1230cff8ec40695 frugalware-0.4-i686-cd2.iso
872912bc9f1caa46895247364bcf7538074f8238 frugalware-0.4-i686-dvd.iso
6a1a49985450d2cad8c8efb7f988c266a454f899 frugalware-0.4-i686-net.iso
81e79a3bbb9d327555d272d841e3d0fc0c784de7 frugalware-0.4-x86_64-dvd.iso
d4b39dbdc9bfadaf379bf7cc3662ce9d0b20a010 frugalware-0.4-x86_64-net.iso
Puh. They are less developers. But they're much faster and have almost everything included we are waiting for.
What's up with arch? Are we going to loose the bleading edge state :?:
AndyRTR

Answer 1

AndyRTR wrote:We don't have support for multiple architectures. Even not in testing. Nobody cares except Xentac.
I care. I'd like to see an x86-64 port. I'd be willing to work on it with you. Is there a todo list anywhere? Anything specific to work on?
We don't have a source build OpenOffice. Some packages take too much time before they get updated even if it is not much work to do(krusader is the last example).
Which is maintained by JGC who happens to have GCC, Glibc, Xorg, GTK2 and gstreamer. Sometimes things have to be prioritised. Krusader doesnt have a higher priority than those. To be fair, a majority of Arch's packages, are updated frequently, and those that arent are in the minority.
For me it loooks that big packages stay quiet long in testing. Is arch becoming more conservative?
Unfortunately it most certainly is.
But it's not the developers... It's the users.
Daily I see posts about people wanting to holdpkg or ignorepkg or whatever xorg, and kernel and udev and other things like that.
The users are becoming conservative. The users dont use testing. So yeah, thats why theres a lot in testing, Nobody tests testing, and then we have to push it out and hope it doesnt mess up too many systems.
raskolnikov: our extra is meant to be stable, but bugs creep in because users dont test.....catch 22!
And running arch not having latest pacman is strange. Isn't it?
Not really.
James