Well, I’ve got some great news for you. Thanks to hard work by a few volunteers, we have alpha community-built packages up and the starts of a download mirror list, which you can find on the new “downloads” page. But let’s talk a bit before you go racing off to install and make sure you know what you’re dipping into.
This project is kind of a preliminary state. It’s just a simple rebuild of the packages, with Perforce’s blessing. There have been no alterations other than build instructions, and no name or branding changes. The repositories are currently just simple mirrors in the Overlook InfraTech namespace. There will almost certainly be some organizational changes as we get going.
You should be able to simply install the package and end up with exactly the same commands as before. However, these should be considered kick-the-tires builds, not something to run in production just yet. We don’t yet have a fully robust test pipeline operational, although with community help we’ll get there soon.
🥳 You can help out by trying these out on non-critical infrastructure. Let us know of any installation failures or anything weird that you run into. And if you have anything else to contribute or would like to be involved in other ways, just drop us a message and let us know what’s on your mind.
In other news, I realized something funny the other day. I’ve been writing in this blog as if y’all knew who I was. And some of you probably connected the dots because of how I shared the posts. But just for clarity’s sake, I wrote an “about us” page with my name and face. If you go check it out, you’ll notice another familiar face.
I’d like to announce that Nick Burgan has joined this little endeavor! He left Perforce a month or two ago, intending to take a nice peaceful break from the corporate world. But the community packaging effort piqued his interest again. He contributed the build system, so he’s to thank for the quick packaging turnaround, and decided that he’d like to be part of the project long term. All the better for us!