Program technical status, 11 April

| Stephen | Process.

[Repost from forum thread.]

Since my previous status summary, written in December, a number of technical aspects to the program have made progress. (It’s becoming clear to me that I only write these when we actually deliver stuff.)

  1. Website capabilities.

Basic community and project hosting seems to functioning reasonably well. There are 28 approved projects, some of which are still preparing their initial content, and 41 communities. It’s probably worth noting that we can easily support multiple mailing lists for each project or community, if the project or community leadership requests additional lists.

There is still ongoing development to simultaneously relax and tighten our Mailman moderation settings, so that a registered email address can send to any list and so that an unregistered email address will always bounce. Mailing list moderators will appreciate the latter.

  1. Source code management (SCM).

The software to add repository hosting to projects is getting close to completion. Internal testing with the Subversion-only option suggests that we should be ready to do a beta deployment in the next six weeks. Project leads interested in hosting their source using Subversion as part of this beta should contact me, directly or via website-discuss.

We’re awaiting further comments on the tentative selection of Mercurial as the distributed SCM selection. Extending the hosting support to handle Mercurial repositories is straightforward, and I expect will be ready–with the then-current version of Mercurial–shortly after the deployment of the Subversion hosting beta.

The DSCM selection and related documents about hosting are available in the Tools community at

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/scm/

In terms of Mercurial use for the ON consolidation, I would like to discuss releasing Mercurial bundles, with per-integration granularity, as part of the weekly drops Steve Lau has been doing. The drop frequency will hold at weekly, until we are hosting read-only ON on opensolaris.org. On tools-discuss, we’ll be talking about specific tools that need to be updated (or have the opportunity to be improved) because of the switch in the DSCM.

  1. Continued source publication.

I believe that, since December, the Developer Tools, Documentation, Install, Network Storage, Solaris Freeware, and X Windows consolidations have all released portions or the entirety of their source trees. In many of these cases, an active community and/or project is available to discuss how these components can evolve.

The split ON tree has made deliveries easy, and Steve and others have continued to move code that we know to be unencumbered out of usr/closed and into usr/src (which is what you get from opensolaris.org for ON source).

  1. ON GCC readiness.

Keith Wesolowski implemented shadow compilation with GCC as a means to keep the ON consolidation warnings-clean with respect to both the Sun Studio and the GNU C compilers. The choice of shadow compilation means that a typical developer’s test burden is still centered on the binaries produced with the primary compiler for the platform; at present, Sun Studio is the primary compiler for both SPARC and x86. Individuals and teams interested in a pure GCC build for those platforms or using GCC for ports to other platforms will still need to examine and test the binaries produced, but should not have to do “basic GCC cleanup”.

The ON GCC status, and related links, are available in the Tools community at

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/gcc/status/

  1. Governance development.

On February 8th, the CAB approved the OpenSolaris Charter. Glenn Weinberg, Vice-President of the Operating Platforms Group signed it, on behalf of Sun, on February 10th. The Charter is linked to by the CAB community at

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/cab/charter/

For those of you enthusiastic about historical documents, however trivial, Jim Grisanzio made a virtual exhibit of the charter Glenn signed.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris?entry=opensolaris_charter_approved

(Whether we do a theatrical all-signatories-signing event is dependent on their schedules permitting them to physically congregate, I expect.)

The now-OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board) is now working on the Constitution and/or By-Laws for the community. The cab-discuss alias is one forum for discussion; the developing document(s) are being composed in the wiki at genunix.org, specifically:

http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/OpenSolaris_Governance

Input into this drafting process is, I believe, always welcomed.

After we get through the various repository deployments, there are a number of opensolaris.org software components that I would like to host, pretty much immediately: we need to improve many aspects of the site, including voting support for the OGB election, code review notifications, per-user repositories, and community, project, and user file management. Plus we could really use some new pictures for the front page. For all these developments, I expect website-discuss and tools-discuss to be the primary mailing lists. Please join in.

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

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris ]