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Hey everyone. I just got finishing up a call with Luca di Maio, the maintainer of distrobox.
He's been very busy latey and as you can see, Distrobox hasn't had a commit in two months. Since distrobox is a critical component of Universal Blue we've had multiple people in here asking how to help so Luca and I bashed together a quick plan to get the flywheel rolling again.
Luca will be moving distrobox into it's own org and outside of his namespace in order to move to a more distributed model of development. I am recommending a CNCF-like structure, the same one we use here (member, approver, maintainer), etc.
First issue is Pull requests (21). We are looking for volunteers to start reviewing PRs and leaving github reviews. Basically, try to bust out the simple stuff for him and curate some of the incoming PRs. You won't have permissions to approve and land code but it will get your work in front of Luca so he can start reviewing. This will lead to trust building and eventually more responsiblity in the project.
Second issue is Issues (129). We need help starting to triage issues and getting that to a manageable level.
Third is general tech debt reduction. As we file these down if you see major issues start filing and PRing.
As we sort this I'll get to what Luca wants to do. He has many ideas around better assemble, which as he describes sounds like a perfect fit for fixing some of the things we wanna do with quadlets, etc. Once we get things in order I am reasonably certain that getting all of you in a call with him discussing this stuff will lead to much a much better distrobox and ublue.
He'll be at FOSDEM this weekend and will be syncing up with openSUSE's Richard Brown, which was the first distro that shipped distrobox, so I'm sure he's going to get a ton of advice there so now's a great time for everyone to gather upstream and get some good container stuff going.
Questions?
👍
(we don't need to wait for the org setup to get involved, we can start right away just by showing up)
👍
I will try help where i see i can help as i want distrobox to become better. my main problem is having the energy to get stuff done (this is where coding is very nice as a hobby just so i have something to do when i have the extra energy to just do things other than the bare minimum to exist 😅, but i can chip in when and if i can)
PS: distrobox cannot go to the wayside, my clean
$HOME depends on it 🤣OK. I'm free.
@HikariKnight are you able to talk on voice?
otherwise I can write out what I'm thinking.
sure
just having you in the room in discussions is a contribution.
a 👍 on an issue or PR can go a long way. 😄
and I think it won't take long, distrobox has like 8.4k stars, once people see things start to unblock they'll hop in too, then we can help onboard more folks and then ideally we end up with a borg collective.
I'm happy to help in any way I can. It's a cool project. I use it for a lot of different things so I can allocate time to give back to it
I spun luca up on the wolfi box, he was all smiles as I walked him through it. 😄
https://github.com/ublue-os/config/issues/210
@tuk.n Do you have thoughts on this issue?
Have you pinged the right person? I have very little knowledge of this area.
I can always provide generic thoughts, though: yup, this issue is bad! 🤭
I thought I saw your name on the list of contributors for toolbox, but maybe it's a different @tuk.n XD
Nah, definitely not me. I'm just a user. 😄
I have so much fun packaging for it and making images. Also love troubleshooting the oddities we run into. It's like I don't even work
I mentioned that white screen that one user was having
I think he'd be happy to help fix it. 😄
That's awesome. Wish I knew the cause of it
different thread please
you are right sorry!
Alright, luca's been merging in PRs, bring out your dead!
@EyeCantCU if there's anything I can do to help to figure out which packages we need to remove from wolfi-base let me know. I'm willing to bet we can drop a bunch of those packages.
I'll have time to wrap this up over the weekend :). It just comes down to isolating what packages distrobox is using for basic functionality. I've removed a lot of them but I was running into an issue initializing the container without a couple of them. We can certainly slim things down
now that the docs are gutted I'm going to wolfi-ze the boxkit action I think.
That'll be awesome. Wolfi-ze all the things