"General availability" #638
Description
General availability is the stage in the release lifecycle of a software product where it can be considered stable and ready enough to be marketed and "sold" to users. Universal Blue officially reached GA in April 2024.
I think we should work towards a similar goal in the near-ish future (Q1-Q2 2026).
The primary purpose of this effort should be general improvement of the onboarding and user experience for new users.
The announcement of "GA" or such would be a marketing push to grow the community (ideally gaining more casual contributors as well, with potential to turn them into maintainers). The goal of that would be to increase the general understanding of what BlueBuild is and get curious new BlueBuild users (but seasoned Linux nerds) on board.
This push should include ironing out identifiable pain points that still exist regarding module and CLI functionality and the usability and content of the website.
The other major issues to tackle too IMO are as follows:
- ...and make it official! base-images#13
- get the base images to be stable, well-defined and documented
- arriving at a stable, functional, and sensical recipe standard #180
- decide whether to push for a new recipe format cleaning up the warts of the old one and what to make it look like
- we may also choose to improve the current format slowly while retaining backwards compatibility, but that may just make things more messy
- front page idea dump website#52
- a respectable and appealing marketing front page that should not cause the top comments on hacker news to be "i do not understand what this project is" and "why would I use this when ansible exists"
- generally improved documentation
We can roll out improvements as they are made, they need not be gated for some sort of "ultimate reveal". After the goals outlined here are tackled, we shall publish a blog post announcing BlueBuild for a general Linux audience, which should be readable and understandable even without pre-existing knowledge of bootc or image-based Linux.