[OpenAFS-devel] Moving Forwards

[Ken Dreyer]

On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 7:15 AM, Simon Wilkinson
<simonxwilkinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Following on from last weeks plethora of resignations and
> negativity, I want to propose some ways that we can move forwards,
> and hopefully reduce the inertia that has built up in our
> development process.

Thanks a lot for this thread.

> We should appoint release managers (other than the gatekeepers) for
> the 1.4 and 1.6 stable branches.

This is a good idea. It brings up some questions I've had about the
future 1.6.2.

1) Does anyone know of any blocking issues that would prevent us from
cutting a release from HEAD on 1_6_x right now?

2) What are the steps/commands for doing a release? I read
http://wiki.openafs.org/AFSLore/GateKeeping/, but perhaps
that should be re-examined to deal with the CVS to Git transition, and
expanded a bit.

3) What is the policy (official, or conventional) for getting
backports into 1_6_x? I have cherry-picked several of Marc's commits
for newer kernels from master to 1_6_1 in order to get 1.6.1 to build
on Fedora 18/19 for RPM Fusion. I imagine that these patches haven't
been backported to 1_6_x at this time because Marc / Gatekeepers don't
have the time. Is it ok if I just submit my cherry-picking efforts to
Gerrit against 1_6_x myself, or is that going to interfere with some
process that the Gatekeepers already do?  I would love to see these
get into 1.6.2 or 1.6.3.

> We should open up RT to all comers. For most projects, commenting on
> issues in the bug tracking system is the first way that newcomers
> get started. But in OpenAFS, commenting on bugs is restricted to a
> select few.

Yep, speaking as a relative newbie, you are right that it's the first
way I would have gotten involved. I even tried adding a comment to an
existing bug, but then I got a message back that I didn't have
permission to write to the ticket. I think it's a great idea to
reverse the ticketing system permissions.

Additionally I have a question about infrastructure. OpenAFS hosts a
*lot* of infrastructure compared to many open-source projects. Given
the discussions about available resources, should the new ticketing
system be hosted by OpenAFS, or would GitHub's issue tracker or Google
Code's issue tracker be viable?

- Ken