The Chakra community has published a review of 2016, with a list of propositions for 2017.

In summary, 2016 has been an interesting year for the community, with some things going extremely well and other things where we could have done better.

Let’s take a personal detour: I re-joined Chakra, both as an user and as a contributor, at the beginning of 2016. Of course I found that many things were changed in these years, so getting used to them took some time. This is also the first time that I try to mix a full-time job with being a member of an open-source community; personal projects are different because I do not have to coordinate with anybody else, so I can keep whatever pace feels best. Let’s just say it has been challenging, but I am adjusting to it, so I hope to get better results next year.

Given this, let’s talk about what I want to do for Chakra next year, in rough order of importance:

  • keep on working on akabei. I would really love for a testing release to finally be ready; as my second priority, I want to refactor older parts of the code that I found hard to navigate during debugging.
  • get more involved in Calamares. I feel like I am pretty familiar with the codebase now: I can start really looking at the “core” features such as the new LUKS support.
  • We received some worthwhile proposals from our users on how to improve the mirror checking UI. I would like to review them carefully and perhaps implement them.
  • Beside the switch to Gitlab and Discourse, I would like to finish the website improvements we discussed at the meeting: this means completing the commit feeds implementation (which I have been neglecting a bit), modernizing the contributors page, etc… this is going to be personally challenging, since my expertise in designing web UIs is very limited.
  • I would like to get more involved in the ISO releasing process. There are several parts that I feel could be more automated to make the process easier; we are also discussing improvements to the communication between people working on the ISO and testers.
  • On the subject of communication with testers, I feel improvements are needed also for big package groups that get uploaded to testing, we just need a clearer picture of what we can do. There are several ways to make the testing job more engaging, such as notifications when larger groups are uploaded, or more standard handling of broken package reports.