[OpenAFS-devel] Update on the status of the nascent 1.8 branch

[Benjamin Kaduk]

To refresh everyone's memory, there has long been a plan to cut a new
stable release branch from master before we start pulling in potentially
destabilizing change such as rxgk support and IPv6 support that would end
up being in a 2.0 release.  There was some discussion about what number to
use, but at this point the next stable (Unix) branch is expected to be a
1.8 series.

Toward that goal, I went through all changes in gerrit a 1.5-ish years ago
and triaged them, mostly just to mark as "not for 1.8", but making some
other notes as well.  We hit feature freeze a year ago (and two days; 13
September, 2015), and have gradually been making progress on the last
handful of things that were desired in the release.

A few months ago, I again went through all (not -2'd) changes in gerrit
targetting master and drafted a list of release blockers, with some things
that were needed before branching (i.e., before alpha 1), some things that
could slip past branching but were needed in the final release, and some
desiderata that were not actually blocking.  I sent this list to the
release team for comment, where it seemed to be generally accepted.

At this point, all of the "needed before alpha 1" blockers from that list
have been merged, though a new one cropped up due to a regression
uncovered by https://gerrit.openafs.org/#/c/11654/ ("afs: shake harder in
shake-loose-vcaches").

There have also been a number of new changes submitted to gerrit in the
past few months, some of which may be bugfixes that we want in the
release.  If you know of a change that might qualify as that, please let
us know.  (Some of those new changes may also be new features that do not
qualify for 1.8 due to the feature freeze.)  I don't think anyone has made
a pass through the changes that first arrived in gerrit after I made the
draft list of release blockers; that would probably be useful for someone
to do.

At this point, I believe the current status is (listing gerrit changes
and a summary of their content):


blocking 1.8 alpha 1:

12362, 12363  avoid the need to have to revert "shake harder in shake-loose-vcaches"


potenailly blocking final 1.8 release, but could be dropped if needed:

11979   ONEGROUP_ENV for solaris

12199+  autoconf cleanup (note that some bits in this stack lack review)

12243+  solaris bugfixes
  There's nine changes in this stack, none of which have any positive
  review.  I don't think I'll have the energy to do all of the reviewing
  for all of them, so if people are interested in this, they should review
  things.


non-blocking desiderata:

12000   consolidate ACL flag definition and printout

11858   afsd: Improve syscall tracing
  I think this one is supposed to be in good shape since review comments
  got addressed, but no one (me included) has looked at it yet

10447   VnodeId type consistency

12068+  hardmount improvements

11898   vldb cache timeout

11629   attempt to auto-tune fileserver for memory target




It would be great to get this last group of changes (and any other
appropriate changes) reviewed.

It would also be great if someone wanted to go through the changes on
master and not in 1.6 (i.e., using git cherry or similar) to get a sense
for what could go in the release notes.

Thanks,

Ben