[Dragora-members] Current Status

[Matias Fonzo]

Hi everyone,

We met my wife and daughter waiting for our next child, little brother.  
In May we started a construction project here at my house, taking 
advantage of the fact that the quarantine has been released a little bit 
here (until Jun 28) since there is no Pandemic in this city, we are and 
I am particularly very stressed since I was behind the workers and 
getting all the materials as possible to advance the time, we believe 
that the baby is coming next week.  We are very happy and at the same 
time very tired and busy so that this construction can be finished, now 
that it can, because I think that at the end of the year or next year it 
will be impossible to build anything, due to the prices and because I 
also think that the powerful people of the world do not want anyone to 
have their/a house...

I mention the construction site because it will be my new workspace 
(there in the background, courtyard).  That's right, they sent me back! 
:-)

I am currently occupying a whole room for the computer and music stuff, 
and we hope to have this space available for when the baby can occupy 
it.

All along the way I've been trying to do things for Dragora, to say the 
least, some of the relevant changes I've made and I'm working on them:

- I've been testing Qi 2.0 and I think it's ready, I'll soon send a 
version here for comments or testing, if possible.

- The name of the architectures we provide for the packages has changed, 
mainly:

  "x86_64" is now called "amd64".
  "i586" remains under the same name.

- I have adjusted the rest of the targets (from the cross compiler) for 
possible architectures that could be provided in the future, in the case 
of ARM they are now distinguished: armfp, armhf, armhl.  "x86_64-32" now 
for example is composed as "x32".

Note that I am referring to the new name given for the architecture that 
composes the packages or package names.  These are based on Debian, 
which has more generic names for the architecture (see 
https://wiki.debian.org/SupportedArchitectures).

This implied making changes to the cross-compiler targets, in Qi, and 
also now the Dragora ISO is composed using the new architecture 
definition!.

- I have improved Dragora by adding new security features to the x86_64 
(amd64) architecture such as "stack clash protection" and "CET 
protection", both now by default.

I did the same for i586, but I still couldn't test it well since the 
current version of busybox doesn't work with the new Musl "time_t".  
There are patches to be applied to busybox, but I prefer to wait for the 
new version containing these changes to be released while I work on 
other areas of Dragora.

- I improved all the scripts related to Dragora tools, Dragora init 
system against shellcheck (see shellcheck.net).

- I have almost all the issues reported in 
https://notabug.org/dragora/dragora/issues **almost solved**.

At the moment I had to leave the code enhancement to the Swap part of 
the installer.  The idea is to make this part that can detect multiple 
(previously enabled) Swap partitions and decide which one to add to the 
fstab, one or more at the same time (via selection).  I already 
implemented and tested this.  I have to do the same for partitions that 
are not activated and you want to format them by activating them.  I 
hope to apply the same concept that you can format one or more 
partitions at the "same time" and add the corresponding entries to the 
fstab.

... I have some other minor changes locally that will improve as the 
project progresses.

Soon I hope to be able to recover and to have accommodated everything 
here like to work of calmer form, already without the bricklayers in the 
house and enjoying the baby.  :-)

The next step or steps are to continue adjusting the installer, finish 
the Swap part and continue with the modification of the menus and 
instructions to install packages.  This has to be re-adapted and super 
tested in order to make a successful installation (since the names of 
the packages have changed, it's a good time to take advantage of this to 
simplify and improve the visual or menu part).  Later on I plan to 
update everything, including the new version of Trinity Desktop to see 
if it works well, I think we will be able to see the new version then...


P.S: I hope each of you is well!