Meethune and I have been kicking around ideas for breathing new life into Leopard. When I was approached to work on the project the goal was twofold; a chroot’d LAMP environment (complete with installer) and some sort of distributed data search/retrieval layer. The former was easy enough to implement however we were never able to garner the resources to support it as it’s own mini-distro. The communication layer never got out of the planning phase for a host of reasons.
The maturity of projects like Xen and QEMU is rapidly making the chroot approach a thing of the past, however the need for easy rollout of these virtual machines is very great. I know Suse and Red Hat both include their own tools for this task, but they don’t support installing a completely different distro.
Long story short, we are looking at revamping Leopard as a vendor-neutral set of tools for installing, cloning and managing virtual machines. Course we gotta replace that horrid CMS currently running the site with Trac, come up with a real roadmap and perhaps even some code… 
Man… It’s been quite a while since my last post here and a lot has changed.
Leopard is moving along at a nice steady pace. We are working with the folks at Newport News, VA on a few modules, and will prolly do a module or two for folks in Harrison County, MS. Meethune, Tim and I are working on a database abstraction layer (think DBI for Python) to provide with Leopard, and will prolly release it to the general public as well.
BreakMyGentoo is growing exponetially these days. Maintainers are being added at a nice rate, and work on the unstable Gnome packages is smoother than ever before. Thanks to tseng, karltk and seemant we have brought our ebuilds into line with Gentoo QA policies. Break now only refers to the software, not the ebuilds… 
We’ve (BMG Crew) also begun planning on a really cool project code-named UberGnome… We will be announcing it as soon as Gnome 2.6 final is released, and I’ll be posting details here as it takes shape…
Back in the saddle again with Leopard now that all the USM/Newport stuff is stablized… I finally got the task list done for the module/package management end of things. Sent it out to the list along with a slight rant about folks on the project that seem to only be along to ride on coattails. Politics has never been my strongest point…
Rhino joined the team and has brought all sorts of really great information for the OGIP. He’s suggested using Relax-ng to validate the data as it’s recieved. The data would still use Z39.50 as the metadata layer, but Relax-ng would add a layer of validation to the mix…
He also came across the W3C’s Web Services Architecture and Web Services Architecture Requirements papers. Not exactly the most interesting read, but perfect standards to know and follow for Leopard/OGIP apps….
This has been a very, very fruitful day out here. All 250+ Leopard CD’s and our promotional lit within the first 90 minutes of the exhibit floor opening this morning. We made lots of contacts, gave out a ton of cards and even had a few run-ins with folks from the Dark Side .
Looks like we may be heading over to ApacheCon this evening for a little while to rub elbows with those folks. Or maybe we will just head back over to Coyote Ugly….
More to come…
