[OpenAFS-devel] Feature freeze for OpenAFS 1.8 on 13 September, 2015

[Benjamin Kaduk]

Hi all,

As we get closer and closer to being ready to branch for a 1.8 release
series, it is time for us to be shifting our focus away from the
development of new features towards stabilizing the tree and preparing for
the release.  There has been some previous discussion of this shift, but
no formal feature freeze cutoff, which is remedied now.

New features submitted to gerrit after 13 September will be marked as -2,
"not for 1.8".  Bugfixes and work towards 1.8 release goals will still be
accepted. [0]  We reserve the right to also mark features submitted before
the deadline as -2, "not for 1.8" if they are intrusive or disruptive to
the tree or do not appear likely to be able to reach a polished state in
time for the release.

This is not intended to be a deadline before which your new feature that
you haven't started yet must be complete, but rather a chance to let
existing work be completed, since there was not previously a cutoff date.
Being submitted to gerrit before the deadline does not guarantee inclusion
in the release.

Developers are encouraged to focus on reviewing changes in gerrit that are
candidates for inclusion in the release, and to make updates to changes
that have been reviewed and need adjustments.

Thank you,

Ben Kaduk


[0] Some release goals which do not currently have candidate changes in
gerrit include:

making pts supergroups a runtime-configured option instead of a build-time
option.  Presumably there would be ptserver command-line arguments for
"always enable supergroups", "never enable supergroups", and "scan through
the database and enable supergroups only if they are already present in
the database" (default).

making cache managers default to encryption both for traffic to
fileservers and to vlservers.

converting server processes to use the new softsig from opr instead of the
old softsig from util.