Back from vacation!

Hi everybody!

First, I want to apologize to people following the Aegir issue queues by email. I have been gone for two months, and I have just now reviewed every (opened) issue that was updated since I left, about a page full. So some of you may have received around 40 emails from my updates. Sorry for the noise, but I think it was worth it. :)

Second, I'm back from vacation (unless you haven't noticed!). I have taken the full month of September offline and it was good (I highly recommend it if you never tried, liberating).

But now I'm back to work at Koumbit and I will resume Aegir work shortly. I still have big sysadmin duties over there, especially for October, as I am doing replacement for a fellow worker, so I will not have a lot of time for the project, but I hope to resume core development shortly.

In particular, I am interested in tackling the following studs in the roadmap:

  • Package drush make - so it's easy to upgrade
  • Make unit tests as I go along - so I don't break everything with the following
  • Integrate the hosting_queue_runner in 2.x core - 'nuf said
  • Move files out of the sites directory - low hanging fruit that would enable clustering support magically
  • Work on the mesh model - our current multiserver architecture is silly, I want to leverage the "new" technologies we have in place for deploying the code (Debian packages, Puppet manifests for the others) and allow nodes to be more intelligent, maybe by letting them run their own queuing daemons
  • Subdirectory support - yes, at last, we should try to target this, if only for the educational sector for which this seems to be a huge blocker. It's wrong, it's evil, but it's what you want, so let's do it. Plus it should make the whole vhost engine more modular...
  • Alien platform support - oui je suis un mécréant!, an infidel! and I believe in diversity, so I'll work on making sense of installing Wordpress from Aegir, if that's humanely possible

Of course, if any one of you want to work on anything in there, don't hold up just because I mentioned it here! I would appreciate if you would comment in the issue queue about your progress however so I don't waste my time. :) As usual, I will report back my efforts with the community as I go along.

Those projects may happen over the course of the next year(s?), but I am enthusiastic about the project, and happy you guys haven't given up while I'm gone!

And by the way, we always welcome new committers, if you are interested, just let us know!

Finally, I want to hand out a big thank you for those of you who manned the fort while I was gone, on the issue queues, the community site and IRC. A special thanks to Steven who singlehandedly restarted the Drupal 7 project, fixed the Jenkins server and so much more. Thanks! That's because of people like you we can get rid of the bus factor here. :)