Here are the minutes from the last Foresight Council meeting.
Agenda:
- Announcements
- Last meeting overview
- Proposed topics
- Future foresight version
- Current Foresight version (2.1.x series)
- Promote WP site to official site location
- Need to update Confluence
- FITS system accounts and organization
- Derive our Identity
- Who manages access to infrastructure?
- Who do you talk to about getting issues on the council agenda?
- Deferred agenda points
- Proposed members/developers
- Next Week’s Agenda
Announcements
- New hostmaks (cloaks) have been created for all new members and developers.. (OgMaciel)
- Paul and I had a nice chat yesterday via Skype and have agreed on several topics related to how to organize and steer the community. More to come. (OgMaciel)
Proposed members/developers
- None.
Proposed Topics
- Future foresight version
- doniphon is not yet ready to announce 3.x – the ideas for workflow and creation of herds/teams for redundancy and parallel development need more time to coalesce. For now, the ball is in doniphon’s court.
- doniphon is still wrestling with the new gcc-4.4.0. It crossbuilds (x86 -> x86_64 and x86_64 -> x86) but it does not build ‘natively’ (x86 -> x86 or x86_64 -> x86_64).
- If anyone wants to try their hand at fixing the toolchain, they can get in touch with doniphon, who mentioned that the new toolchain is in a (non-public) repo at http://www.rpath.org/web/project/foreplay/. Access and rMake contexts will be granted to anyone willing to actually try to build and understand it. Recipes are well commented for a change.
- Current Foresight version (2.1.x series)
- doniphon proposed that we focus on feature freeze and testing packages for the 2.1.2 release.
- doniphon needs volunteers to help clean up old/dead/broken packages and cross reference with groups so that packages move to -qa properly.
- Og Maciel and doniphon will work on a plan for how to cut this and announce sprints as appropriate.
- doniphon added that we should do our best to support current users, but that main efforts should go into enriching the developer base. This in particular includes developing documentation, so that new developers can jump in and get started in relatively short order.
- Promote WP site to official site location
- It was agreed to promote the new WP site to the official site location. Og Maciel will handle this.
- The council will have admin rights to the site.
- Og Maciel volunteered to be editor and pcutler will assist him as time permits.
- ermo, afranke, TForsman and perhaps Stephanie ’stef’ Watson (we need to ask her) will help move content over.
- Need to update Confluence
- Og Maciel talked to gxti in private about the benefits we will see by upgrading the Confluence wiki to a newer version and gxti will look at this over the weekend. We have two issues filed against the wiki – one by pcutler (IT-60) that involves a bug where pasting content drops the formatting and one (IT-77) where Confluence doesn’t handle Chinese characters.
- From the release notes alone, it appears that upgrading Confluence will both fix security issues, affect performance positively, improve the user experience and allow editing directly in OpenOffice via the office connector.
- FITS system accounts and organization
- pscott, doniphon and ermo will work on this (IT-29). Additionally, ermo will be granted admin permissions in FITS.
- During the discussion, pcutler proposed a team lead type for QA work and that everyone should be responsible for triaging bugs. He also suggested regularly scheduled QA sessions. pscott mentioned that it could be helpful to have a group of users who had triage rights. Doniphon mentioned that he’d like to work on the group/workflow issue as well as it ties into his new workflow and metadata plans for 3.x.
- In particular, pcutler proposed that the above process should be given a fixed amount of time (on the order of 3-6 months) in terms of putting down a roadmap on how to grow the developer base of foresight.
- Og has talked to gxti in private, who has promised to look into updating JIRA (the FITS platform) to the newest version. ermo will help Og Maciel drive this.
- Derive our Identity
- There was general consensus in the meeting that we need a little more time for this. pcutler suggested that we let it simmer on the ML for a little while yet, until around June 30th (setting a deadline primarily to drive it forward)
- Who manages access to infrastructure?
- Currently, it’s been mostly the council (doniphon, ken, pcutler).
- Og Maciel would like to see a definition of roles – what is a member? A developer?
- doniphon would like to avoid too much red tape, but would still like to work on workflow tuning. It is clear that this needs some careful thought if on one hand we are to avoid bottlenecks and on the other avoid too many chefs in the kitchen.
- Discussion ensued, with pcutler noting that we need to figure out what we have, before we figure out what we want. He suggested that we need to document the infrastructure that Foresight currently has as well as who has access to it.
- ermo will drive the effort to document the current infrastructure. This will be documented in the open on the wiki to encourage accountability per doniphon’s sentiment.
- pcutler, doniphon and Og Maciel will have a chat about how to define tasks and roles. It should be noted that this ties into the FITS workflow issue discussed above. It will also be discussed who can grant access to resources.
- Who do you talk to about getting issues on the council agenda?
- Current practice is for Og Maciel or Paul to send out an announcement on the ML and have a wiki page with the agenda and time+date for meeting.
- Deferred agenda points
- The deferred agenda points from last weeks meeting primarily concern workflow improvements, which are adressed implicitly above.
- TForsman will drive a cleanup of current/retired Foresight developers and present his findings next week.