UPDATE: 0.2 Alpha release soon, even closer relationship to Drush.

We finally have HEAD to a stable enough state that we can work towards releasing an alpha release in the next week or so. This is pretty exciting news because it means that we're nearing the end of the 0.2 Development cycle. The current state of our critical issue queue is looking damn fine, but more importantly we have also been very active in the Drush project, in our attempt to eliminate the differences between Drush and Provision.

After we release the alpha, we are going to be going even further in our relationship with Drush.

Just in this development cycle, we have already ported the unix pipe communication layer we developed for Drush commands. Drush commands can now easily call one other, but much more interestingly, they can also call drush commands on remote servers. The end result is that there is now a Restful API for drush commands, that works both locally and on remote servers.

We have spent considerable amounts of time on Drush internals that affect us too, apart from the previously completed logging and error handling work, we have also created a context API for Drush, which significantly improves inter process communication, and has allowed us to clean up provision's own API's significantly.

As part of our goal to stop having to work around Drush' shortcomings, we rewrote the entire Drush bootstrapping layer, making use of the new API's we have created. Drush is now far more error tolerant, and we're actually able to bootstrap up to the layer we require to be able to use Drush exclusively for an install or update command.

The major announcement resulting from that improvement, is that provision will no longer be provisioning Drupal sites.
It has been decided that we will be moving all the install and update related code from Provision to Drush. This will mean that Drush itself will now have the ability to install new Drupal sites, and update existing sites, with full support for install profiles, modules, themes and locales.

Because of the API's and communication layers we have developed, Provision will now be passing off those tasks to Drush, which reduces provision's code base and gives it a level of focus it was lacking slightly before. Provision is now focused on the services it provisions (ie: apache, mysql). It will also help to let provision take it's place as simply an extension to Drush, and not a Super-Drush as it may be.

The code that we have developed and matured in provision, will now be even more useful, to a larger amount of people, than it has been before. Anyone that has wanted the features of provision, but didn't want the database and virtual host management, will now be able to use
Drush directly.

I'll write a short update soon about the more Aegir related aspects of the changes that have been happening, but I felt this was important enough for it's own post.