Considering that 2.0 will be a complete rewrite of Midgard, it's useful to assess the qualities of 1.4 in order to understand the reason for a rewrite. It's important to realize that the first beta release of 2.0 will require a minimum of three months to produce. This means the developers will restrict their 1.4 activities to bug fixes and mail list support after work begins on 2.0. There are no plans for a 1.X minor release. This circumstance mandates that 1.4 meets user needs during the period between the release of 1.4 and the first release of 2.0.
The value of 1.4 extends beyond that of an application. We have the experience of building an application with a community of OS developers, users, writers and business investors. Most of us became involved in the project by contributing to an application for which we were not part of the design process. Our continued development has uncovered the limitations of the 1.4 monolithic kernel. We're identifying a set of requirements for 2.0 that are based on our experiences with 1.4.
The redesign for 2.0 isn't limited to our code. We have an opportunity to recognize the value of our combined experiences and enable everyone in the Midgard community to participate in and influence the design and construction of Midgard 2.0. A set of requirements documents that can be directly commented on within a public forum are being prepared.
Emiliano Heyns, 2.0 branch maintainer, is leading the design considerations. The first requirement is 100 percent ascending compatibility with the 1.4 branch. Four directions for portability at the operating system, storage back end, scripting language and web server create universal portability. The first implementation will be Linux, OpenLDAP, PHP and Apache.