March 2021 News Post
posted on Mar 03, 2021
Greetings! I am really happy to announce some few changes to the distribution. I wanted to write a new blog post to summarise them so you can get up to what is happening in Carbs Linux.
Switching to Sourcehut
I have been thinking of moving development to Sourcehut for a while now. If your repository remotes reside at GitHub you are encouraged to switch them to Sourcehut. Mailing lists for discussion, development, and announcements have also been created for both the distribution, and the package manager using Sourcehut as the host. See the page on mailing lists for more information on subscribing to the mailing lists.
This does mean that issue trackers now reside at Sourcehut, and I will be deactivating those in GitHub very soon. I have yet to decide whether on keeping the mirrors or deactivating them completely, but I will be giving three months of notice if it is decided to move away from GitHub completely. Regardless, the main repositories are still hosted at our own server, and I have no intentions on changing that for the foreseeable future.
State of our own Git repository
In the near future, I will be moving our git server, and will be opening spots
for other users, who want to make use of the git server. People can use it to
serve their own cpt repositories, or personal projects that can be related to
Carbs. I will post an announcement when this will happen, and a blog post that
tells more about the new repository. Expect more by the end of March.
Wayland and Dbus
There are new repositories for dbus, and wayland, which are still works in
progress. These are meant to be options for those who request it, and are not
meant to be enforced package repositories. For example, any package outside of
the dbus repository shouldn't require it to work, and shouldn't list it as a
dependency. Packages can still be written using those as optional dependencies.
This change also raises the question of whether Carbs is ditching Xorg or not. No, we are not ditching Xorg, Wayland is added as to serve an extra option for those who don't own graphics cards from some specific manufacturer.
Next release for CPT
I had been working on the next major release for the package manager since December, and it is coming close to completion. This release focuses more on the library itself, and using the library more effectively on the contrib tools. Unfortunately, until this time, the library wasn't properly documented, and there weren't any unit tests for the library. Even though, the changes to the package manager are close to completion, documentation and tests are what is holding me from making the next release.
Website Update
I have recently updated the website in its entirety so that it looks more appealing. I have updated the stylesheets and created a stylesheet repository and I am planning on extending it to use with other Carbs websites.
The website is now generated using Emacs Org Mode, and its biggest advantage is
that I can freely write posts without thinking about plaintext output, which
held me back from writing big posts. I have also created a few org-mode link
abbreviations such as the one that let me easily link to packages. There are
also few disadvantages from using this method, which I am hoping to resolve as
moving forward. One of these disadvantages made me remove the generated website
from the git repository, now I generate and serve the website through
post-receive hooks. Once I resolve these, however, I will be adding the docs
directory back to the repository.