[Slackbuilds-users] Status Report

[Robby Workman]

I know there's a bit of anticipation by now, and probably some
pondering as to why we haven't got a set of scripts out there
for 13.1 yet, so I guess some explanation/discussion is in 
order...

Basically, the Slackware 13.1 release snuck up on us (yes, even
though several of the SBo admin team *knew* it was coming), and
it happened to coincide with real-life conflicts for several of
the admins, so we didn't get as far along with preparation as we
normally would have.  Because we believe that, like Slackware, 
it should only go public "when it's ready," we decided to wait 
until we were comfortable calling things "ready" for public
consumption before spinning tarballs and such and putting out
a public changelog in the usual manner.

The other major factor that's played a part in the delay is 
something that lots of people have long requested, and that
is tracking the repository in git.  Yes, that's right - we
now have a git repo with everything in it.  Consider the ensuing
comments to be NON-FINAL, NON-BINDING, and SUBJECT TO CHANGE
based on feedback, our preferences, logistics, phase of the
moon, and various other known and unknown factors...

http://slackbuilds.org/gitweb/ has a web interface to the 
git repositories - you will notice that there is a 'slackbuilds'
repo and a 'templates' repo, and each of them contains exactly
what the name implies.

The 'slackbuilds' repo contains several "predictable" branches:
11.0, 12.0, 12.1, 12.2, 13.0, and 13.1, and each of those has
exactly what the branch name implies.  It's a bit early to be
setting anything in stone, but unless something changes, the
'13.1' branch at any given moment should be the equivalent of
what is available on the website (in other words, it's exactly
what you would have gotten from an rsync of the slackbuilds/13.1/
tree if we didn't have a git repo).  

Each admin will have one or more separate branches (which might
have various names) where he will push approved submissions as
they are cleared.  From time to time, one of us will gather the
various commits from the admin-specific branches and commit them
to master, and once we decide to do a public push to http (the
"old" way of doing things), then we'll merge master into the 13.1
branch, generate the tarballs, gpg sigs, and ChangeLog, and sync
that over to the http tree.  Again, the http tree (the old way)
will always be in sync with the 13.1 branch (until 14.0 is out).

For those of you who don't know git and/or have no desire to learn
it, fear not -- nothing changes with respect to the rest of our
site.  Everything stays the same in regard to rsync, ftp, http,
and so on.  

For those of you who *do* know/use git, this is another option for
you.  For the time being, submissions will still be done using the
existing method - git pull requests are not an option right now. [1]

This probably doesn't need to be said, but for your own sanity,
DO NOT base any work on an admin-specific branch (e.g. on my
'rworkman' branch) -- those are subject to be rebased, removed,
etcetera at any time.

Anyway, we hope to have all the kinks ironed out of this soon,
and once we do, we'll get everything up and running normally.
Thanks for your support and patience, and in the meantime,
enjoy 13.1!

[1] That's not to say that a git pull request won't be honored.
    In fact, if you were to clone master and host it on e.g. github,
    and create a separate branch for each app that you submit via
    our submission form, and note that in the comments of the 
    submission, it's certainly possible that some of us :) might
    use that.   This is particularly true for cases where:
      [ $admin == rworkman ] && [ $changetype == trivial ]  :-)

-RW
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