At October the 3rd, "German Unification Day", 1:56:48 MEST the "T2" project
tagged the internal milestone 2.1.0-alpha ("Way to heaven"). This was just
a few hours after the estimated date that was October the 2nd - Valentin's
birthday ;-)

"T2" is a community driven fork from the ROCK Linux project which aims at
simplicity and clean and lightweight implementation instead of adding every
random feature that comes to someone's mind. "T2" aims to be open for active
maintainers and currently seven (!) people have write access to the "T2"
Subversion repository (which to our knowledge are six people more than a ROCK
Linux tree currently has). This organization provides for delivery of quick
bug and security fixes (not relying on a single person in the process),
offers a nice development climate and does not loose version control
on renames (as the submaster thing currently does).

The tag was done after a huge amount of cleanup work after the fork from
ROCK Linux which happened at revision r3594 - July the 21th - 21:55:13 MEST.

The install and desktop target build reasonable well - on x86, sparc,
sparc64 (with a bit more work to be done until "stable") as well as powerpc.

"T2" is an intern project name for "try two - (second try)" or "technology
two". A more public relation aware name will be chosen later as soon as
we find an interesting one.

Major changes from ROCK Linux 2.0 / 2.1:

 * gcc-3.4.x used exclusively

 * a "sanitized" linux-header package which currently uses 2.6.8.1 headers

 * X.Org is used exclusively (since weeks++)

 * some packages got split into individual ones (e.g. alsa, mad, ogg-vorbis
   and xine)

 * the .desc D tag for the cvs:// URL scheme got revisited, the ugly date
   encoding via a '!' fot dropped in favor of more natural form as to be
   executed manually on the command line. Now also the use of any possible
   cvs option is possible. For example instead of:
     cvs://pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/glibc::libc/!2004-05-01/
   the new format is:
     cvs://:pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/glibc libc -D 2004-05-01

 * the .desc NODIST "hack" support was removed, as well as the new CD tag
   no imported. Support for similar features will be added via a separate
   DIST tag (e.g. [DIST] nomirror nocd ...)
  
 * the .desc tags CV-PAT and CV-DEL support was dropped

 * many packages got updated and added

 * no people named repositories - most packages should now be sorted
   into category repositories - which so far scale quite well

 * no package fork / package split stuff, no pseudo cross native
   compiler hacks and no perl cpan meta package fork whatever (tm) stuff

 * no default kernel stuff - a "sanitized" linux-header package is always used
   (always as up-to-date as possible - currently 2.6.8.1)

 * no linux*-src packages - third party modules will be build as part of any
   kernel package (will be implemented next week ;-)

Major plans for "T2" 3.0:

 * build system rewrite (maybe in C++)

 * no separate cluster code-path, no build as root: everything is always cross-
   built using a single code-patch as ordinary user, and optionally distributed
   via distcc

 * no build priority - instant and sophisticated dependency analysis is always
   used

 * revisited configuration system

 * targets will select to-be-built packages by specifying dependency nodes
   (not those stupid static regular expressions ...)

 * optional graphical configuration

 * optional graphical dependency visualization (especially for end-user Emerge)

 * revisited installer - including an optional graphically one, not on
   SuSE's Yast2 or M$ Windows level, but even surpassing the usability of
   Fedora(tm whatever) or MacOSX(tm bla)

 * revisited post-install / STONE stuff ...

The next milestones are schedules for:

 * 2.1.0-beta, October the 23th

 * 2.1.0, October the 30th (intentionally Rene's birthday ;-)