[Xorp-hackers] XORP 1.7 status

[Bruce Simpson]

Hi all,

    A few words on how a XORP 1.7 release could be pushed out.

     It's likely that I will break the Thrift work up further, because a 
XORP 1.7-RC is overdue. It's also likely that the RC would be limited to 
only required bug fix and infrastructure work, and no new functionality 
would be planned.

    Please understand that I am oversubscribed :-) I am currently the 
only active developer on the community branch, apart from JT Conklin, 
who is occasionally active on the SCons and build engineering parts of 
the branch.

    Where we have volunteers to test RCs and offer help with 
integration, that process is likely to get much easier, and produce a 
1.7 milestone release more quickly.

    So it's very likely I will push back on patches in the interim. The 
1.7-RC would involve shipping at least a source code tarball, and USB 
memory stick build. Patches and bug reports stand more chance of acted 
upon quickly, if they follow house code style, include test cases (and 
preferably logs of reproduction), and have a Trac ticket open for them.

    We understand the LiveCD is popular with folk who are building test 
network configurations e.g. in VMware or similar virtualization 
environments. A show of hands on this would be great.

    It currently involves a small amount of manual patching of a FreeBSD 
7.2-STABLE tree to put the LiveCD together [1]. There is a documented 
procedure for this; although, if any of the trees involved are in flux, 
this can be tedious to deal with.

    What I'm likely to do, is to call a freeze if/when we've reached 
consensus about the tree being ready for 1.7, a LiveCD snap being 
desirable, and it will require testing before we raise the release flag.

thanks,
BMS

[1]    One of the things I've been trying to do, as time goes on, is 
push generic code back to the upstream project(s) where it really 
belongs, or where we've derived from. The FreeBSD based LiveCD 
generation is one such piece of work. I've had a little discussion with 
phk@ about it, but didn't reach agreement about the way forward for that 
work. I hope other FreeBSD developers can pitch in on that; there's been 
some interest about it, as it would just make everyone's lives that 
little bit easier.