I've had a few weeks to get oriented and thought I would bring folks
up to date on the work we intend to pursue in the short term. My
primary concern after an initial survey is creating additional
infrastructure to get currently internal-to-Sun projects and
conversations out in the open, on the opensolaris.org site, before
the development phase of Nevada closes, and we move into a more
limited Beta phase, where project work starts to focus exclusively on
integration readiness.
That is, even though we are working to define and transition to a
community development process and governance model, I don't want the
absence of the documents describing such things to be an excuse for
not moving conversations outside. Accordingly, we are working on a
number of items that eliminate that excuse. I'll start with the
general items, and then some specific to the ON consolidation.
1. Elementary project hosting support.
Typically, in terms of communication, projects inside Sun are
very similar to projects we see in open source efforts: they
have web pages, mailing lists, and download areas. (Some may
also have IRC channels, Wikis, and blogs.) Much useful
conversation and experimentation can take place using only these
media, and so I want to get basic project hosting functionality
up on opensolaris.org.
Projects that prefer to host elsewhere can use this facility as a
pointer to their primary site, so that they appear in lists of
OpenSolaris-related work.
2. Source code management, first phase.
The Code Manager ("TeamWare") distributed source code manager
(SCM) has been in use at Sun for over twelve years; its
predecessors were also distributed SCM solutions. It is
difficult to envision how we might move the current practices of
the consolidations using TeamWare to an SCM that doesn't match up
well with the features and extensions that have been in use for
so long. However, TeamWare itself has deficits when we consider
its use on the open Internet (and even within Sun's wide area
network).
In order to make progress, and in order to support new and
current projects and consolidations that are not tied to
TeamWare, I believe that we must offer a centralized SCM facility
while the current set of open source distributed SCM solutions
are evaluated against criteria based on TeamWare's use within Sun
and on suitability for use on an Internet-hosted site. Luckily,
recent developments in the SCM space suggest that one or more
SCMs may meet many of these criteria already. A draft set of
criteria will be published shortly, after which candidate SCMs
will be evaluated against them.
The proposed centralized SCM solution is Subversion, based on
features, ease of integration, and community vigor. Information
on Subversion may be found at
http://subversion.tigris.org/
Tools to make the source drops of TeamWare-based consolidations
available via a read-only repository will also be
found/refined/developed. We will publish a representation of ON
via a read-only repository during this phase.
3. Partitioned ON source tree.
A number of ON-based projects are ready to share their
development versions, in code form, on the site. However, the
current source publication process for ON is too arduous to
expect individual projects to use team member time to handle
their own publication. We are thus partitioning the source tree
into open ("usr/src") and encumbered ("usr/closed") subtrees, so
that projects can easily publish and independently buildable open
tree containing their changes. This work is already underway.
4. ON GCC compiler readiness.
Steady progress is being made to make ON builds GCC warnings
free. As we are now closing in on a warnings-free build, we will
be examining the current build tools to make GCC clean (or, if
you prefer, alternate compilation clean) an ongoing requirement
for integration, without being an undue burden on contributors.
There are numerous possibilities that are opened up by a GCC
build, but the primary justification for the present work is that
it finds bugs prior to integration.
There are, of course, many other activities going on: Karyn's list
of consolidation priorities hints at what additional code is nearing
openness, creation of additional website content, the already
mentioned development process and governance and charter work, and
the publication of ON source drops. (Plus work in community
building and support, marketing efforts, ...) I thought I should
call out that we have added additional sponsors for ON and that John
Beck has been working to close some gaps in sponsor technical
coverage, so that code fixes submitted during this interim phase
don't get chilled waiting for a sponsor.
Feedback welcome. I'll read it all, but I can't promise replies to
all.
- Stephen
--
Stephen Hahn, PhD Solaris Kernel Development, Sun Microsystems
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Stephen Hahn, PhD Solaris Kernel Development, Sun Microsystems
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
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