Project Status Update - week 5

Let's start with the list:

Today's project status

• [x] A bootable Live USB image
• [x] The image can perform an install
• [x] Updating works, everywhere
• [x] Deploy the build system itself, natively
• [x] repo server infrastructure
• [x] more testing, much much more testing
• [o] Final code review
• [.] User guides
• [ ] Documentation

And a new item on the list this week:

• [ ] Final publication

What changed?

I'm progressing with the self review and upped our automated testing, which is going extremely well. Review is tedious and slow. Lots of edge cases and cleanups to wrap up. Dropping dead code for things that weren't needed in the end. This work will continue even after the public release - there's never an end to reviewing code and testing, it's just that at some point I'm going to decide that there's no substantial items left and all that I'm finding is stuff that doesn't really affect anything, like nit picky things.

I'm churning the dispatch deployment over and over, writing a setup guide and documenting all the rough edges, and fixing them. Then blowing it all away and starting from scratch, again, to make sure the deployment is solid. There still will be manual steps in this process. For instance, during the deployment process, you will need to provision keys and tokens, and that can't be a mouse click on an HTTP web interface. So there will be some steps in the setup that require you to open a console and hit some commands in a terminal, for good reasons.

What's still left?

I really need to take some time to start up a documentation website and scaffold up an index, so the documentation in it can slowly start growing. The easiest thing to do is to pick some easy framework and write out the skeleton, but, it's just not something I've gotten to, yet.

I will likely just build something simple that can directly render markdown into HTML. The current front page uses the same method to render these posts and it means I can directly write markdown without having to think about anything else. That makes things very simple.

Things are looking very good

It's almost time to make everything public. We're close to where I want to be and the major issues are almost all resolved. There really is less and less left every day that I would consider blocking for a release. I have to actually stop thinking or spending time on non-important things these days because it's really tempting to dive into new features.

--sofar (aka Auke)