While Spring has yet to come here, the rainy days are giving me some time to think about the future of Sabayon and summarize what’s been done during the last months.
donations
As far as I can see, donations are going surprisingly well. The foundation has now enough money (see the pledgie.com campaign at sabayon.org) to guarantee 24/7 operations, new hardware purchase and travel expenses for several months. Of course, the more the better (paranoia mode on) but I cannot really complain, given that’s our sole source of funds. Here is a list of stuff we’ve been able to buy during the last year (including prices, we’re in the EU, prices in the US are much lower, sigh):
- one Odroid X2 (for Sabayon on ARM experiments) – 131€
- one PandaBoard ES (for Sabayon on ARM experiments) – 160€
- two 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs (one for Joost’s experiments, one for the Entropy tinderbox) – 185€
- two 480GB Vertex3 OCZ SSDs for the Entropy tinderbox (running together with the Samsung 830 SSDs in a LVM setup) – 900€
- one Asus PIKE 2008 SAS controller for the Entropy tinderbox – 300€
- other 16GB of DDR3 for the Entropy tinderbox (now running with 64G) – 128€
- mirror.de.sabayon.org @ hetzner.de maintenance (33€/mo for 1 year) – 396€
- my personal FOSDEM 2013 travel expenses – 155€
Plus, travel expenses to data centers whenever there is a problem that cannot be fixed remotely. That’s more or less from 40€ to 60€ each depending on the physical distance.
As you may understand, this is just a part of the “costs”, because the time donated by individual developers is not accounted there, and I believe that it’s much more important than a piece of silicon.
monthly releases, entropy
Besides the money part, I spent the past months on Sabayon 11 (of course), on advancing with the automation agenda for 2013. Ideally, I would like to have stable releases automatically produced and tested monthly, and eventually pushed to mirrors. This required me to migrate to a different bittorrent tracker, one that scrapes a directory containing .torrents and publishes them automatically: you can see the outcome at http://torrents.sabayon.org. Furthermore, a first, yet not advertised, set of monthly ISO images is available on our mirrors into the iso/monthly/ sub-directory. You can read more about them here. This may (eheh) indicate that the next Sabayon release will be versioned something like 13.05, who knows…
On the Entropy camp, nothing much has changed, besides the usual set of bug fixe, little improvements and the migration to an .ini-like repositories configuration files syntax for both Entropy Server and Client modules, see here. You may start realizing that all the good things I do are communicated through the devel mailing list.
leh systemd
I spent a week working on a Sabayon systemd system to see how it works and performs compared to openrc. Long story short, I am about to arrange some ideas on making the systemd migration come true at some point in the (near) future. Joost and I are experimenting with a private Entropy repository (thus chroot) that’s been migrated to systemd, from openrc. While I don’t want to start yet another flamewar about openrc vs systemd, I do believe in science, facts and benchmarks. Even though I don’t really like the vertical architecture of systemd, I am starting to appreciate its features and most importantly, its performance. The first thing I would like to sort out is to be able to switch between systemd and openrc at runtime, this may involve the creation of an eselect module (trivial) and patching some ebuilds. I think that’s the best thing to do, if we really want to design and deploy a migration path for current openrc users (I would like to remind people that Gentoo is about choice, after all). If you’re a Gentoo developer that hasn’t been bugged by me yet, feel free to drop a line to lxnay@g.o (expand the domain, duh!) if you’re interested.
On The Other Hand 
I’m using sabayon with systemd for a few months. From Grub to desktop in less then 15 seconds. Arch and Fedora already made this step. What are you waiting for ?! 😛
As a major change, they’re making sure it works well out of the box, so users don’t worry about having a box that doesn’t boot after installing systemd. Always been on the bleeding edge, but this can be a full drain off instead of a little bleed if they’re not careful enough (forums will be crowded of people crying).
Keep the good job guys, I’ll wait patiently uintil everything is ok 😀