The bright future of Foresight Linux

Refining Foresight

Why

Foresight is what I use for almost a decade now (and that means almost the whole time since it was created by Ken Vandine).
It was originally based on rPath Linux and Foresight 2.0 still is.
So rpath doesn't exist anymore (it was aquired by SAS a while ago) and our existing base is getting outdated to a point where maintenance is getting a burden.

How

There were several options to solve this issue.
1) build foresight 3 from scratch
2) rebuild an existing distribution from source and use it as a base
3) base on an existing (vital) distribution

Which one

Actually we discussed all these, but given our manpower we chose to base our new shiny Foresight on Fedora as is, so that we can focus again on providing a stable modern rolling binary distribution.

The Plan and Progress

So what we're doing is importing all! of Fedora20 into our own repositories using a tool called mirrorball
It will create Sourcepackages for conary containing the matching rpms and srpms and build conary packages from them.
I'm not going into the details here. You can look some up on our foresight-devel mailinglist
The initial import and built is already done and we're now in the process of creating conary groups from the information of the comps.xml
when that is done it should be possible already to adopt a fresh install of fedora20 for use with conary packagemanager.
Next step will be doing regular updates and imports of the fedora20 repository.
Then we will build foresight on top of this.
Creating groups like we want them, adding artwork and extras. Import rpmfusion repositories until we have a foresight that matches our needs.
And of course finding a way to easily install foresight and convert existing fedora installations.

Why not...

...just use fedora?
Well first we all got to love foresight as a distribution and a community.
And we love conary. Conary is pretty strict when it comes to dependency resolution. We already found packaging issues of fedora20 just by importing and rebuilding it with conary. foresight is a rolling distribution and we hope that with the adopting of fedora we can make it possible to just roll from fedora20 to fedora21 painlessly. Conary has rollbacks since it's beginning and it's a great packagemanager that helped us maintaining a rolling binary distribution for almost 10 years now.