Development progress and future plans

[nhandt64]

Hi,
I'm Wello, the founder, main developer of sarchile project.

First things first, I'd like to say thank you to many people who has been with sarchile project from the very early state.
I do know that the project is still way too elementary and simple that we can't even call it a thing yet, but many plans have made that is not yet present on the Tracker board.
Some of you had already known that I do have a high school graduation exam next year, which very important to my future life (It's similar to China's gaokao, look it up on Google!). Thus, I cannot do any much progress to the development until late 2022. But I have some plans for this project along the way.

If you have recently got sarchile (re)installed, you can see some of build info we slided into /etc/motd file and the current state of this project is Preview.

We've made some progress to improve the manager script, as well as support for 32 bit version of ARM such as armv7, armv8l. amd64 support will be started right after arm32 support is considered as stable to use. Although we do know that not many people would use amd64 anyways.

While Termux with proot is the base where sarchile happens on your Android, we acknowledged about its disadvantages. The two majors of these are performance impact and filesystem mounting issues that leads to web browsers can't be launched. Thus, a new base "technology" to have sarchile working on is necessary.
We've found some solutions such as making the use of QEMU port on Termux or manually port a container technology on desktop/server to Android (this would make sarchile independent from Termux team, where xeffyr doesn't sparking joy at all).

About manager script: basic functions such as back up, login as user, base image checksum verify and setup configuration is planned.
Since multiple architecture (multiarch) is on the way to sarchile, the base image building time is significantly increased. We're trying to make Github Actions to build the multiple images parallelly.

About user: you're logged in as root user when starting sarchile by default. This may bring many security concerns. You, however, still can create a regular user and bring up the sudo or doas when needed but you have to manually edit the script manager and some of you may have no time to spent on figure out how to set another default user. We will temporary resolve this issue by making default Arch Linux ARM user, alarm as default user and list it in the wheel group until the manager script support to pass in -u user argument.

Additionally, we will never bring sarchile to any Termux repository because of their bad behavior in appreciating other communities' work and willing for collaboration. Termux only provides a ground base for sarchile to work and there is absolute no affiliate to sarchile developers and Weeb/Linux Team.

Finally, yes, configuration file support is also planned.

Thanks for reading, stay safe and have fun!