A 1.4 release

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Hello everybody! For those of you who don't know me because you're 
rather new here, I would like to introduce myself: I am one of the 
three {Darwin,Mac}Ports old... team members holding the "honorary" 
title of "Project Manager" who has been too swamped by Real Life these 
last months to manage to get any productive work done on this great 
project, hoping that'll change in the not too distant future. I'll tell 
you though that at one point I did come to be known as a quite active 
contributor, so there! :-P To the new and old blood that's still with 
us, thank you so much for your continued drive and enthusiasm put into 
this project, we wouldn't be walking on our own two feet if it weren't 
for you!

	Now, however, I have been lurking on this list and have kept an eye 
over a couple of issues which I believe warrant a new minor release of 
our infrastructure, 1.4 I propose. As I am not exactly called Mr. 
Current Affairs at this point in time, I would like to call for some 
feedback on what should be considered for inclusion in the new release, 
but I think I can at least propose a small starter list:

1) Final and long overdue DarwinPorts --> MacPorts migration in our 
base code, carried out by Randall Wood if he so volunteers;
2) Migration to SourForge's new mirrors redirection mechanism in our 
trunk/base/src/port1.0/resources/fetch/mirros_sites.tcl file, with the 
addition of maybe two or three hardcoded fail-safe mirrors as suggested 
in the mail forwarded by Kevin Ballard;
3) The addition of a MacPorts mirror list in the same file with a 
starting single entry pointing to a distfiles/ (or any other better 
idea) location in our svn repo, where we can start loading selected 
distfiles for projects missing them at their main sites. Such list 
could pave the way for a future MacPorts mirroring system, as adding 
new entries to it would be transparent to users and Portfiles, the 
latter only having to use "master_sites macports:foo:bar" to leverage 
our mirrors just as they currently do SourceForge's;
4) Any other differences between trunk/base and /brances/release_1_3, 
to be integrated into a future release_1_4 branch, including but not 
limited to:
	-) the unarchive --> archive rollback of my earlier "fix", performed 
by Daniel Luke;
	-) Kevin Ballard's fast_load improvements;
	-) a new portfile.7 man page, I think...?
	-) anything else I'm missing...? Anyone care to diff the two code 
bases? ;-)

	Please feel free to append to this list whatever you feel should be 
included in the new release branch, lets brainstorm at least a bit over 
all the ideas. In any case, I would like to point out it wouldn't be 
too wise to try to fix the entire world with 1.4, I have myself voiced 
some rather large and therefore mid-term goals for the project as a 
whole and have also heard of some interesting ones from other 
developers, but needless to say all those warrant wider discussion and 
consensus among us all, so lets try to keep this release a small and 
focused one, comprising only necessary and urgent fixes. World 
domination may come later on! ;-)

	We used to have a pretty good and detailed page detailing our release 
process, most kindly created by James Berry, up in our old Wiki, but I 
don't believe it survived the migration so I'll see if I can coordinate 
with Kevin Van Vechten to resurrect it. Once I do I would like to call 
for someone (someone*s* ;-) volunteering to give me a hand putting 
together the release, as there are a few things to keep an eye over and 
I don't think mine alone will suffice.

	Once we get this ball rolling I'll post a release candidate I would 
like all of use to test as extensively as possible, so keep your eyes 
open for future announcements, please.

	Thanks again for your hard work put into the project and for bearing 
with me this far in my mail (yeah, still jmpp -v -v -v, some things 
never change!). Hope we can make a great 1.4 release and thus pave the 
way to move forward in great leaps :-D

	Much regards to all,...


-jmpp