[os-infrastructure] State of the onion

[Andrew Ross]

Hi Everyone,

Things have been fairly quiet on the list for a while. 

I thought it might be a good time to send a brief update acting as my
unofficial position as QB for what we're doing in svn/trac Now that
osbootcamp6 is over, I'll come up for air.

1) p & svn

I believe it's clear we have consensus that we'll run p & svn at least
for the rest of 2008. If you object, please speak up either on the list
or in private to me and I'll relay anonymously.

2) Platform support

We badly need to get the major community platforms working. The
following people have volunteered (thank you!) to take the lead to
ensure the following platforms are working reliably and well documented
out of svn.

Mike T - Ubuntu

Daryl M - MacOS

Steve B - SUSE

Viktoriya D - Windows
(King can help)

We'll hold the code in svn fairly static for a week or two until we can
get these platforms working well. After that, we'll start syncing (see
#3).

3) Syncing between p & svn

Looking for volunteers to help take this on. It feels like a week or
two's work for the right people.

J was thinking about helping out here, but could probably use a hand.

4) Branch management tools

Alex Trofast is working on a web tool that will let people create a
branch & manage who has commit access to it. Alex Thiem is helping so
the user/authentication model is stored in LDAP.

5) Directory structure

I'll (Andrew will) propose something and post it here soon so we can
review as a team and iterate until we're all equally ok with it.

6) Tests

Chuck T did some work to get the tests working out of svn. Once the
directory structure (#5) is settled, we'll copy the tests back to the
right place so this will work out of the box. Denise V has offered to
clean up the diffs (partially caused by being out of date from piccolo)
and maintain the test suite thereafter. Volunteers to add test cases are
appreciated.

7) Merging improvements

Looking for volunteers who want to work towards the best merging tools
we can get. CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

8) Community build downloads

We'd like to do nightly builds from svn and make the output available
for download. CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS.

Andrew