Hi Martin, You nailed the challenges beautifully and provided an elegant plan for moving ahead!
I'm in to contribute for the long term but have a conflict Tuesday so I'll miss the call. Two suggestions on the roadmap: - Wait before setting a date until you know the critical goals and have some idea of how to meet them. - Define the regression threshold for a release to go out. It goes on schedule regardless of enhancements but it has to pass some hurdle of quality if its supposed to be "production ready". I think the Ubuntu model and date based releases is a winner! Just make sure to set the right expectation with users on how safe it is to use each revision. Super work, thanks for sharing it. Greg S ***************** Message: 8 Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:23:38 -0400 From: "Martin Langhoff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Server-devel] New architect and roadmap - and phone conference To: server-devel <server-devel@lists.laptop.org> Cc: Bryan Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi all! I am slowly taking over the ownership of the software/OS side of the XS. Wad - who's done an amazing job with the insane workload he has - will continue to shoulder a large part of it, specifically networking issues and hardware. And will hopefully lend a hand as I learn my way around the existing code and build procedures. On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Martin Langhoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > am planning to do a writeup of the draft roadmap and open it up for > discussion, and a phone conference is a great idea. Today I've been creating a few new pages in the wiki - you'll find there is a roadmap that outlines releases, goals, timeframes, etc. See the Roadmap section under http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server (we'll need to do a cleanup/update of the other pages later) Overall, my intention is to take an Ubuntu-like approach of defining calendar-based releases each having key goals. If the goal is complex, describe it in a "blueprint" wikipage. And break those goals down into enhancements/tasks/bugs that are filed in trac. A specific goal might slip a release - ouch! - if it is not ready, but we will let it slip rather than hold the release. Also, a desired feature/goal may turn up earlier if someone gets it done earlier; as we pick up pace, I expect this to start happening more. In other words, we are going to run a focused-enhancements, release-driven operation, quite a bit more conservative than the XO, which makes sense because - the XS tasks and software are a lot less bleeding edge by nature - the XS provides infrastructure services - backups, upgrade services, WAN access - that the laptops rely on As you can see, this is lead developer / release manager talk more than "architect" talk. Right now, the architecture that matters is the one that will get us to a pragmatic 1.0 (read the roadmap for more details ;-) ) without painting us into a corner. As we get more on track, there'll be more long term architectural work - and documentation of the thinking. I also want to describe clearly what code the OLPC-XS team will maintain and give people ample freedom to work on other important areas that - for any reasons - we are not working on right now. If you can coordinate with us to implement things in such a way that we can fold it into the mainstream release, fantastic. But bear in mind that initially the OLPC-XS team might a bit busy - we can give some general direction, and you should be able to work independently. Are people still interested in a phone conference? If yes, we could do it Tuesday 25th 8am US EST, as per http://worldtimeserver.com/meeting-planner-times.aspx?&L0=US-MA&L1=NP&L2 =CL&L3=&L4=&Day=25&Mon=3&Y=2008 I think there's a decent phone conferencing setup here, and we can complement it with an IRC channel for meta-discussion, passing URLs, asking for a turn to speak, etc. Can someone volunteer to take notes of the spoken part + keep an IRC log to post both to the wiki somewhere? The new wikipages are background reading for the phone meeting - so we can all focus on the interesting questions during the call ;-) [ Unfortunately, Skype won't work with many participants. As someone who normally has to pay outrageous int'l call rates from NZ, I can recommend an international calling card instead of paying the telco rates. Or Skype itself to place a call to the US. ] Overall, I think we are going to get this done one release at a time, keeping our eyes firmly on the ball, until we get to 1.0-ness. Who wants to be part of it? ;-) martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel