Ongoing Core 2 Port Status

[Mike Barnes]

Hi folks - just a little note that I've been meaning to post for a
couple of days, and now that I'm in an especially good mood becuase of
the possibility of getting the last issues with Anaconda sorted out,
here we go ...

We seem to have achieved a degree of stability with the "Carmen"
release, which was intended as a development base for fututre systems,
and a bit of a leg-up from RedHat 7.2. The question "what next" has
always been hanging around without much of an answer.

Given the limited resources we have, the limited life-span of the
Alpha, and the rather narrow interest (compared to other platforms),
keeping pace with Fedora Core isn't likely to happen. Core 3 is just
around the corner, and we're only just seeing the possibility of
getting an installable Core 2 build happening.

I've swapped a few emails with Cristian lately about where we go from
here. We both agree that we'd keep maintaining our own systems no
matter what, so we might as well keep sharing what we're doing. The
best idea, in my humble opinion, is to pretty much fork off a new
Fedora-based distribution.

It'll be almost 100% identical to the mainstream tree (although
lagging a generation or two behind), and we'll use the release sources
and Rawhide whenever possible, but there's a bit of a psychological
gain if we stop calling it "Fedora Core" and feel like we're trying to
keep up.

Unless anyone has a better idea for a name, the next release built
from the Carmen base, will be labelled "Alpha Core". It will be be an
ongoing project, any help welcome (of course), and could conceivably
last as long as there's someone running it on an Alpha.

Thanks to everyone who has debugged, tested and suggested so far. My
name has been mentioned in conjunction with this project fairly often,
but it never would have got here without the work - direct and
indirect - of a great many other people. I'm happy to have been
involved, and look forward to getting a lot of use out of my Alpha in
the future.