[Cryptech Tech] "ksng" branch of Cryptech Alpha firmware now available as a binary package

[Rob Austein]

At Fri, 23 Dec 2016 15:46:41 +0100, Yuri Schaeffer wrote:
> 
> I do not have access to such a programmer but they seemed cheap enough
> to take the risk. So I followed your guide to the letter and nothing
> unforeseen has happened. Success!

Whew.  Thanks, Yuri!

> Now, I didn't do any further testing but I can get in to the console and
> issue commands.

If you got that far it's probably fine (more famous last words).

> Some time ago I was trying to get it to work with OpenDNSSECv2 but I
> failed. Hoping I could find some hints in the source or software
> upgrades I looked for a repository...

Yeah, per previous posts by other members of the team, we've been
horribly bad about communicating with the wider community.  Sorry.

You can get a bit more of a feel for what's been happening if you
follow status on https://wiki.cryptech.is/timeline (unfortunately
cluttered with meaningless Wiki page updates at the moment due to
necessary system upgrades, but there's a checkbox to filter those) or
by subscribing to https://lists.cryptech.is/listinfo/commits.  None of
which is a substitute for real communication, nor terribly interesting
when people don't check anything in, but maybe it will help a bit.

> I'll say it politely: the abundance of repositories made me decide
> it was not worth the effort pursuing.

Indeed, back when the project started we had a long debate about
whether we should have one big repository or a large number of small
repositories, and we never really reached a clear consensus, but we
had to pick something and some people had already started creating
little repositories, so we went with that.  Fortunately, git allows
one both to split repositories and to merge repositories, so if the
community manages to achieve consensus, we should be able to convert
what we have into whatever form that consensus says we should have.

Release engineering under the current scheme involves updating one of
the releng/alpha super-repository, which pulls in specific commits
from all the code repositories via git's submodule mechanism.  Binary
packages correspond to specific commits in releng/alpha.

But, yeah, that's why I thought it was (past) time to push out binary
packages of work in progress.  Trying to follow what's happening at
the level of the individual code repositories can be quite confusing.

> I'll give OpenDNSSECv2 another shot in he new year.

Cool.  Thanks again!