Fedora Bootstrap Project

[Jaromir Capik]

Hello everyone.

As some of you have already noticed, we recently started a Fedora affiliated
project called "Fedora Bootstrap" that had a short kick-off meeting on the last
Devconf, which took place in February. Unfortunately this announcement gained
a delay due to the Fedora trademark licensing we had to resolve with RH Legal
prior making the project public and some of you were probably startled
and wondering what this is all about. So, let me introduce the project a bit.

The project is targeted mainly at our ability to build Fedora from scratch,
so that an introduction of new architectures is easier and shorter. However,
it has more goals than that. We'd like to see it to become a cure for all
bootstrap related issues you can imagine. We base our work on a set
of bootstrap scripts initially designed approximately 4-5 years ago
by DJ Delorie and maintained by a group of people (DJ Delorie, Mark Salter,
Al Stone, Jon Masters, Aldy Hernandez, ...) since that. The current effort
is targeted at creation of a testsuite we'd like to wrap the bootstrap
scripts with. That way the scripts can still work as a standalone bootstrap
solution whenever we need them and the periodic testsuite execution should
keep the solution up-to-date and ready for immediate use.

Thanks to Micah Denn + folks from the Fedora design team and thanks
to Stephen Wadeley from the Content services we already have a project
homepage with sane content, available at

  http://fedora-bootstrap.osop.rhcloud.com

I'm also happy to announce, that we already have a working testsuite covering
the first stage of bootstrap. You can find the results and build logs at

  http://fedora-bootstrap.osop.rhcloud.com/results/stage1/

When we started, the whole table was red except two green fields.
Now it's mostly green, thanks to everyone who offered help.

I'd also like to say "thank you" to everyone, who helped us to commit bootstrap
recipes for the first stage to the Fedora git. That allows us to engage all
component maintainers in the bootstrap process and do more automation stuff
in the future.

We're currently enhancing the testsuite to support stage2 testing
and to generate presentable results. And again, I'd like to ask everyone
for support with troubleshooting and pushing the stage2 recipes
to the Fedora git. It's gonna be a lot of work and we cannot succeed without
your help.

I'm looking forward for your cooperation and in case of any questions,
I'm here for you.

Best regards,
Jaromir Capik.

--
Red Hat Czech, s.r.o.
Software Engineer / Secondary Arch

Email: jcapik at redhat.com
Web: www.cz.redhat.com
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkynova 99/71, 612 45, Brno, Czech Republic
IC: 27690016