[Fedora-ia64-list] Fedora ia64 update - we are nearing the beta!

[Doug Chapman]

Fedora ia64 update

Once again it has been a few weeks since I have sent an update so this
is a bit overdue.  There has been some good progress over the last couple
of weeks.

First I am happy to announce that Yi Zhan of Intel has taken over the
"build master" duties for Fedora ia64.  He will be the one making sure
packages get built and also be spinning release trees.  This will
allow me to focus on more project organization.  Also, he has already
been very helpful in looking over my build scripts and finding some
bugs that had been causing us issues.

We have worked out several ia64/efi anaconda install issues and things
are installing cleanly now.  I think we are nearly at beta quality now
and we hope to release a Fedora-9 for ia64 beta very soon now.  In the
meantime it would be very helpful if we could get some more install
exposure on various hardware.  If people could try to install the bits
available at:

	http://ia64.koji.fedoraproject.org/fedora-ia64/rawhide-test/

That would be very helpful.  I have done installs (both text based on
a serial console and GUI on VGA) but I have not had a chance to do much
testing beyond the install.

The other thing we have worked on in the past couple of weeks is a
release process.  I want to be sure we have a well thought out and
documented process for how we go from nightly rawhide trees to a
beta or final Fedora release.  We have been stumbling through this
a bit so far but are making progress.  Since we are the first  of 
the secondary arches to do this we are blazing a trail here which
I think will be helpful for other secondary arches and the Fedora
project in general.  All of this will of course be documented on 
the fedoraproject.org wiki.

Once we have a beta the plan is to get it out on the normal fedora
mirroring system so there will no longer be a need to manually
modify the yum configuration when you want to install a new package.
Also this will help get wider exposure for Fedora-ia64.  I have been
working with Tom (Spot) Callaway on this and have been assured that
once we have a beta "barring an act of god" we can get it out on the
mirrors.

- Doug