In general, from reading their forum and being in their IRC chat, users are less than satisfied by the lack of timely package updates done by the existing Arch Linux ARM project, as well as devs being impossible to reach and lack of transparency of how the build system works.
I think there is room for improvement, i.e., a fork of upstream Arch Linux that rebuilds every x86 package for aarch64 that is done in a transparent way while being more user-friendly and community oriented. I think EndeavousOS is well positioned to pick up this effort. EnOS is very user friendly, with a forum and I think they have IRC or at least Matrix channel already. They also have transparent infrastructure, build servers, mirrors, etc. already.
I am wondering if EnOS is interested in trying an ambitious project like this. What do the ARM devs think?
Yeah, having upstream Arch Linux support would be the ideal scenario, but from what other people have told me, it sounds like they don’t want to add other architectures at this point.
Just to be clear, are you asking if the EOS ARM devs want to create an ARM fork or are you proposing creating the fork yourself and asking if they would like to be downstream from the fork instead of ALARM?
The former. I’d like EnOS (and I’d be willing to join you to help set up and maintain CI for example, I am a devops engineer as my day job and have experience here) to do this project.
The EOS ARM team only has one active member right now. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I don’t think there is much chance of him taking on that large of a project.
To provide any kind of sustained success with a project of that size, you would need a decent number of committed members.
We’ve had similar experiences regarding the ALARM project but right now we don’t have the expertise, time or even the motivation to take on that huge of an Endeavour (no pun intended).
We had an internal discussion about the upstream issues (ALARM is upstream for us) and decided to keep the status quo. Even if the updates are slow, they are still coming and our ARM systems are still working.
Who knows how much they spend annually for hardware infrastructure.
A mirror network would be necessary from scratch. Current EnOS mirror servers don’t require a lot of memory space for the handful of EnOS packages. A server for Archlinux ARM core and extra repositories would require a LARGE amount of memory. I don’t think most of our volunteer mirror suppliers would go for that.
Granted, this is for Archlinux and and not Archlinux ARM. Archlinux ARM doesn’t require all of the above manpower, or resources, but it is still significant amount of resources.
EnOS has the following resources.
Obtain and maintain server hardware, and maintain web sites, etc, - 1 person Bryan
Active developers - 5 total 3 for x86_64 and two for ARM
Maintain mirror infrastucture - 1 person Alpix
EnOS salaries - $0
EnOS capital - donations from our users. Thank you to the donating users, much appreciated.
Archlinux is a professional enterprise, EnOS is a hobby distribution.
This is way too big for a small hobby distribution, simply to duplicate what is already there.
Pudge
EDIT:
A lot of people think Archlinux is a volunteer distro. It is not, it is a corporation.
Considering I have spent money on ARM devices solely for testing purposes, my salary is actually in the minus category. I am sure Bryan, the other devs, and Alpix have also donated hardware.
If you’d like to see the actual amount of money Arch brings in, it’s easy to do. They use Software in the Public Interest (SPI) to handle their funds:
Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation registered in the state of New York founded to act as a fiscal sponsor for organizations that develop open source software and hardware. Our mission is to help substantial and significant open source projects by handling their non-technical administrative tasks so that they aren’t required to operate their own legal entity.
More pertinently, here is year to date as of March 01 2023.
You can look up SPI treasurer reports by month here, then find the project you want to view (they handle funds for Arch, Debian, ffmpeg, xorg, libreoffice, haskell, and more). You can look up a specific month or YTD for a specific month.
Archlinux Employee Directory
Archlinux corporate office is located in 2290 N 1st St Ste 103, San Jose,
California, 95131, United States and has 31 employees.
“corporate office” indicates a business entity. 31 employees are receiving a salary. Might be a board of directors or something?
None of these sites are accurate. Half of them scrape random data and make assumptions. Just like all those public figure sites that list a salary. They data is utterly useless. It is clickbait.
