New: Git-based source repository and other news

openmamba provides a new web service on the src.openmamba.org site where the recipes (.spec files), patches and additional files representing the over 5500 source packages with which the distribution in format is created and maintained are easily consultable. tracks. The service, based on the Gitea platform, in addition to the RPMs also hosts openmamba’s internal projects.

Other activities completed in 2023:

• the obsolete arm architecture (armel soft-fp) was abandoned to concentrate current and future developments on the two main architectures x86_64 and aarch64; the i586 (x86 32bit) architecture is still maintained in particular to provide the compatibility subsystem for 32-bit applications on installations for x86_64, used for example for Wine and the Steam video games platform;
• last September the migration to a flat root filesystem hierarchy was completed, i.e. eliminating duplicates of the *bin and lib* folders in the root folder (/) and in /usr; this operation has caused some problems in the updates in various phases, however leading to greater maintainability and future stability of the systems successfully updated or installed from scratch after September 2023;
• the constant maintenance and development by the sole maintainer in recent years has brought the distribution to an update level between 85 and 90% (repology) with stability, security and modernity benefits found on the Plasma and LXQt desktop targets;
• the main repository of the rolling distribution has been renamed from devel to base.

In the next future:

• the KDE Plasma environment will need to be updated to be based on Qt6 following the upstream schedule;
• the new package management on src.openmamba.org opens up renewed possibilities for collaborative development also considering that the platform provides functionality for each package for reporting problems, for drafting documentation in Wiki format and for managing Pull Requests; the currently centralized development mechanisms based on the webbuild interface and the autospec and autodist layers could be enhanced using tools such as tito and mock; at the moment there are no precise plans and these developments will depend on any interest and availability found.

Happy 2024 wishes.

Silvan