Re: [Plash] Plash status?

[Mark Seaborn]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 7:05 PM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
> I love plash. I've used it to make something completely insane a reality (a
> wiki in which most of the code for the wiki software is part of the wiki
> itself and editable by anyone, http://hackiki.org/ ), and it's stood up to
> all attempts at hackery thusfar. And there have been attempts at hackery :P

Wow, that is great!  Thanks for sharing.  I'll have to take a closer look.

> However, I am concerned by the development status. The last release is over
> two years old now, and the latest commit to the SVN repo is 7 months old ...
> neither of these necessarily mean anything, but they don't bode well. Thanks
> to Debian's slow release cycle, the latest Plash still works on the latest
> (stable) Debian release, but as others have pointed out, it's quite out of
> date with respect to Ubuntu's release cycle, and I'm concerned that when
> Debian eventually makes another release, I'll end up having to hang back
> indefinitely to keep with Plash. And of course we all know that "Debian
> stable" already means "Debian obsolete", so "Debian oldstable" is "Debian
> horrifically obsolete". I could try to up-port Plash myself in this
> eventuality, but I just don't know enough about the system to do that.
>
> It's also concerning that Debian has switched from glibc to eglibc, not sure
> how much that affects plash's glibc port (if at all).

Upgrading PlashGlibc to a newer upstream glibc release usually doesn't
take too much work.  I did an upgrade a few months ago, but didn't
finish testing it and pushing it to the Git repo.  So making Plash
work on the latest Ubuntu/Debian isn't too hard.

The most time-consuming part is running the build scripts that build
chroots for multiple Ubuntu/Debian releases and build and test Plash
in them.  This has been why I have tended to run out of spare time
when I have tried to work on Plash again recently.  Maybe it would be
sensible for me to drop testing on the older Ubuntu releases to save
time?

I'd really like to get the autobuilder running again and producing
packages for Ubuntu Lucid.

I also harbour an ambition to switch Plash to using Chromium's
seccomp-sandbox.  As well as being more secure, it would remove the
need for PlashGlibc, which would reduce the maintenance burden and
build time significantly.

Cheers,
Mark