Program technical status, 7 November

[Repost from forum thread.]

It’s been two months since my initial status message, which is probably a bit too long. Most of the efforts I mentioned in that update have made progress, so it’s worth mentioning their current status:

  1. Elementary project hosting support.

The web site development for simple project hosting is underway. At present, those enhancements are expected for delivery sometime in December. (You may have noticed that a number of issues with the site were recently fixed.) In parallel, we are attempting to eliminate some of the manual steps in community and project creation.

  1. Source code management (SCM), first phase.

The first phase of source code management involves adding Subversion hosting for individual projects and for the ON consolidation to publish ongoing changes in a read-only Subversion repository. Prototyping for the former has begun, but is dependent on the elementary project hosting work.

The first phase of source code management involves adding For ON, Stephen Lau has been experimenting with publishing a “squelched” SCCS history; you can see the result of Chandan integrating this work in the latest release of the source browser. For instance, here’s a file with some recent revisions and also the squelched history:

http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/history/on/usr/src/cmd/svc/configd/configd.h

This work, along with some SCCS and TeamWare insights gleaned by Alan Burlison, is expected to be the basis of any SCM migration we pursue, as well as for the short term read-only Subversion publication.

  1. Partitioned ON source tree.

The partitioned ON source tree is undergoing internal code review–internal only due to the encumbered code involved. Mike Kupfer gave much more detail in a recent blog entry

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/kupfer?entry=on_the_road_to_nightly

As noted in my previous update, a partitioned tree means that projects can issue public source drops of their development code, and get proper community development going.

  1. ON GCC readiness.

Bug fixes that eliminate GCC warnings have continued to integrate into the Nevada gate. As a result, we’re now able to finish drafting a cleanliness policy for integrations and making the tools changes to support them. This policy will be discussed in the Tools community, once the draft is complete.

Because we’ve been making progress on those initial items, new aspects of the program will receive more attention. The two new areas of focus are discussed below.

  1. Governance development.

The development of the governance for the OpenSolaris community is being led by the CAB. One effort in support of that has been creating a document articulating the engineering values that go into OpenSolaris software, as well as a process that contributors can follow that results in the production of such software. The most recent draft of the development process is available as HTML

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/onnv/os_dev_process/

or as PDF

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/onnv/os_dev_process/d-devproc-alpha.pdf

If you’re subscribed to cab-discuss, you know that drafts of the charter, which transfers responsibilities for OpenSolaris to the community from Sun, are being vigorously discussed in that forum. We’re attempting to keep the various stakeholders engaged so that the charter document can be completed and ratified promptly.

  1. SCM, second phase.

The evaluation of a distributed SCM solution will be pursued directly now. I’ll be issuing draft requirements and an initial candidate list very shortly; this discussion will take place in the Tools community, although I’ll send a notice to opensolaris-discuss.

In terms of source releases, I thought I should also mention that libm, the C math library, was released in binary form in the past month. Cleaning up the source code for release is in progress. And, as I mentioned in another thread, team members have reviewed the packaging tools source and are working out whether a two step release is needed there as well. The Java Desktop System consolidation successfully published their code last week; other consolidations are getting close to releasing their trees as well.

As always, please share your concerns; I am happy to receive them privately or on the list.

[ T: OpenSolaris ]