The following is an overview of development projects that need to be done before the operating system can be considered ready for production use.

Boot Sequencing

Currently, service init scripts are provided by the monolithic initscripts binary package. These init scripts are executed in the lexicographic order of the symbolic links matching /etc/rc.d/S* that target them. The names of these symbolic links are currently hardcoded in the build makefile of the basefiles source package. This monolithic packaging and hardcoding of link names is a temporary and poor technical solution that doesn't scale with the number and selection of services that can be installed on a system. Init scripts should instead be provided by the packages that provide the relevant system services. The order in which init scripts are executed should be determined by dynamic boot sequencing based on inter-service dependency metadata.

This boot sequencing can be done when the system boots or after a new system service is installed. For reference, NetBSD uses a program called "rcorder" to determine a boot sequence at boot time. Many GNU/Linux distributions follow (to some degree) the Linux Standard Base (LSB) specification, which defines "Comment Conventions" for dependency metadata and a method for installing sequentially-named symbolic links. Conforming implementations perform boot sequencing at the time of service installation. Because boot sequencing at boot time can slow down system booting, it is better to perform boot sequencing at install time.

Thus, generally speaking, the solution to be adopted in this system is to make packages that provide system services also include the necessary init scripts (installed in /etc/init.d), to include inter-service dependency metadata in init scripts, and to use a tool at the time of service package installation to generate sequentially-named symoblic links in /etc/rc.d.

An obvious boot sequencing tool is "insserv" maintained by Werner Fink and used by Debian and openSUSE. However, this C program (in compliance with the LSB) assumes the use of runlevels. This operating system uses the init daemon of BusyBox, which doesn't support runlevels. Therefore, we'll need to either modify insserv to work without runlevels or write our own tool for installing symbolic links to init scripts.

Additionally, we need to decide how completely we'll conform, if at all, with the LSB in this area.

Hopefully, this can get done by September 2012.

Multiarch

Multiarch refers to the ability to install and use packages built for non-native architectures. It is currently being documented and implemented in Debian and Ubuntu. Multiarch is useful for this distribution because it makes cross compiling easy (see "Package Cross Building Tool" and "Multiarch Cross Toolchain Packages" below).

Simply speaking, there are six aspects of a multiarch implementation:

In summary, there is much design work to be done, opkg and opkhelper must be modified to support multiarch, and certain packages will need to be built to handle multiarch library paths. Of course Debian is a great reference implementation, but there still remains much original work to be done.

Installation Bootstrap Tool

A tool similar to debootstrap of Debian needs to be written to bootstrap the installation of a basic system. It can be used for building packages (see "Package Cross Building Tool" below) or installing the operating system on hardware targets.

Basically, the tool would fetch from the package archive the index of packages, determine which packages need to be installed, download each package, and unpack each package. Since the package manager may not be available, the tool must handle dependency resolution and package unpacking on its own.

To be determined is how the "second stage" of the installation – the execution of package maintainer scripts (preinst and postinst) to complete the configuration of each package – will be done. At least most of the time, this tool will be used to install packages built for an architecture that differs from the architecture on which the tool is run; therefore utilities used by maintainer scripts may not be executable. In this situation, debootstrap leaves behind a copy of itself in the installed system to be executed on the target architecture. Such a solution might not work for this tool, because nothing can be executed on the target architecture until the installed system is booted, and the installed system shouldn't be booted until after the packages are configured.

We can't use debootstrap, since the formats of our binary packages and package archives differ slightly from those of Debian. But we can model our tool after debootstrap or even just fork debootstrap.

If written portably (i.e. in conformance with POSIX.1), this tool could be used to make base system images on any UNIX-like operating system with an implementation of tar. On any operating system that also has a chroot program, this tool can be used with the package cross building tool described below to build packages for this distribution. Therefore, these tools can be thought of as a "Software Development Kit" ("SDK") for the distribution, usable on any capable development system.

Hopefully, this tool can be done by October 2012.

Package Cross Building Tool

A tool similar to pbuilder and sbuild of Debian needs to be written to build packages within a chroot environment containing a base system installed by the installation bootstrap tool. It needs to support cross building of packages using multiarch cross toolchains.

Multiarch Cross Toolchain Packages

Needed are packages of toolchain components (e.g. GCC and EGLIBC) that use multiarch library paths.

There is currently a Google Summer of Code 2012 project to develop such packages for Debian.

Packaging

There are always more source packages to be made. Software that should be packaged soon includes: