Activity has been a bit low again this week. It seems to make sense to do weekly releases currently (rather than bi-monthly), and Thursday's release had only one new feature (Tahoe LAFS) and a bunch of bug fixes.
Looks like git-annex will get back into Debian testing soon, after various fixes to make it build on all architectures again, and then the backport can be updated again too.
I have been struggling with a problem with the OSX builds, which fail with
a SIGKILL on some machines. It seems that homebrew likes to agressively
optimise things it builds, and while I have had some success with its
--build-bottle option, something in the gnutls stack used for XMPP is
still over-optimised. Waiting to hear back from Kevin on cleaning up some
optimised system libraries on the OSX host I use. (Is there some way to make
a clean chrooot on OSX that can be accessed by a non-root user?)
Today I did some minor work involving the --json switch, and also a small change (well, under 300 line diff) allowing --all to be mixed with options like --copies and --in.
I think that there is nothing fundamental about Mac OS X, which would prevent one from making a clean chroot that would work for non-root users. For instance, I believe that jailkit has been reported to work just fine. The problem is that you'll have to rebuild most of the stuff you need from scratch, which is very tedious. Might be easier to find instances where Homebrew has something like -march=native added to the $CFLAGS (not that I particularly fancy Homebrew of all 'missing' package managers on OS X).
Anyways, it sounds like I'm going to get a Mac Mini donated sometime soon and I'm curious as to what would be the best way to make use of it for the CI system...