[Xorp-hackers] Meeting minutes - Thursday 22nd April 2010

Tue May 4 01:26:07 PDT 2010

These are the minutes from the most recent xorp hackers conference call.

Adam

----- Minutes of meeting on

Adam Greenhalgh - attended
Eric Johnson - Florida international university
Lin Du - not present
Ben Greear - Candela Technologies
Fred Bauer - 2003 @ icsi and xorp inc
Michael Paisner - Avetek pacific - military contractor - concerned
user (inc. tom knowls)
Bruce Simpson - 2004 @ icsi and at xorp inc, working on xorp and has
contracts with others.
Aaron Shang
Mark Handley - started xorp, wrote majority of rib, router mgr and xorp shell
Atanu Ghosh - 1st employee , and ran xorp for many years.

Agenda :

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0. (Adam to chair this item)
 - Introductions of those on the call and background.
ok  - Agree who is to chair the main call, proposal is Mark Handley.

adam/atanu on wave - Agree who is going to take minutes.

1. Copyright attribution for new changes.

 - Which organisation should possibly hold the new attribution ?
  - UCL
  - a XORP foundation (Do we need to set one up ?)
  - Individual
  - Other

Mark outlined the background to the copyright, originally code was
ICSI's and then transferred to xorp.inc . xorp.inc did gpl/lgpl the
code.
The current bidding process winner wasn't known.
Mark outlined the options above.
Bruce : It is a big issue, especially in the embedded world
particularly on the license type front.
Mark : Discuss 2 as well.

2. LGPL / GPL / BSD license for new changes.

Mark : 1.5 was the last BSD release. Current Protocols GPL , Libraries
LGPL. Do we want to roll back to 1.5 ? Some items have changed a lot
others haven't.
Ben Greear : Interested in keeping GPL and LGPL , not interested in
licensing his changes under anything other than GPL. Individual
licensee.
Michael Paisner : Wants an open source , but wants a quality keeper.
Fred : Bruce , what are the main changes ?
Bruce : main 1.5 changes, added vrrp , scons work . Those changes
could be rolled forward.
Mark : BGP changes.
Atanu : Footprint reductions by JT , but lost a lot of the tests.
There would be a lot of changes to roll back to.
Bruce : Has a customer, who he has advised to go back to 1.5 for their
business model.
Mark : First thing , new protocols can be on any license. Second
thing, is 1.5 can be linked against newer libs.
Mark : New BGP changes will remain under GPL.
Mark : Proposes staying with GPL and LGPL and moving forward from 1.6
release as its under sourceforge from now.

All : Agreed.

3. Policy for adding committers.

Mark : This is the only time when we don't have full time committers
and we now need a new open model for committers. What should the new
model be.
Ben : Small number of people acting as reviewers and then pushing the
code in from mailing list publications.
Bruce : Few people with the knowledge to do this. But need a quality control.
Mark : This is part of item 4. But how do we approve a new person ?
Adam : 10 patches accepted from the list accepted ?
Ben : We need a person / group to say yes / no to a patch. Some one
needs to lead to take the patches.
Atanu : Do we break this down to subsystems and have one person per sub system.
Mark : Committers suggest new committers and then agree new committers.

4. What is the patch approval process.

Committers : Bug fix goes in. Larger changes discussion amoung committers.
Committers : Test local platform and then fix changes on other platforms asap.

5. Project Management.

 - Who is in charge ?

Mark : Majority of those with commit privs, to vote.
Ben : Dictator approach.
Decision : Committers collective decision, with mark casting vote.
- How do we run things going forward ?

6. Tinderbox

 - Current 4 Platforms.
 http://buildbot.cs.ucl.ac.uk:8010/waterfall (and for the xorp-ct tree
http://buildbot.cs.ucl.ac.uk:7010/waterfall )

Mark : Accounts, available to add core team to create new accounts.
Adam to add 64bit Ubuntu 10.04 when released to buildbox.
Atanu : A number of tests are missing , certainly for bgp and ospf,
haven't checked rest. Not a lot of work , but some to switch it back
on.
Atanu and Ben : To working on doing this.
Bruce : Status , all tests that can run as c++ programs except bgp are
running. Anything that requires running a shell script is turned off
except for a few in xrls. Compound tests and bgp test harness not
working.

Reinstate xorp tinderbox list.

7. Do we need mirrors ?

Consensus seems to be that mirrors are not required.
Mark will ask the mirrors list if mirrors are useful.

8. What is the todo list for the next release (1.7) of XORP.

 - What is required to get the current svn repository out as a release.

Mark: What has changed.
Bruce: Scons, deployment, footprint reduction, bug fixes in XRLs.
Installation has totally changed, standard locations now being used.
Shared libraries renamed for ease of use.     Library origin change so
shared libraries can be found anywhere on the disk.
Adam: How many tests will be re-enabled before the release is rolled?
Mark: Should try and re-enable the tests.
Mark: The release should be as good as the 1.6 release.
Ben: Put out a release candidate and see if it fails.
Bruce: Make a release branch.
Mark: There are very few changes so don't worry about making a special branch.
Mark: What is required to make a release?
Bruce: Make a release as soon as possible, take Ben's changes for 1.8.
Adam: Would like to see Debian Sparc and Fedora 12 build, i.e. all
Tinderbox systems.
Ben: Big patch required for xif file passing with the C preprocessor.
Mark: Please try and commit the changes to the tree for Fedora 12.
Mark: Make release as soon as possible and then take Ben's changes for 1.8.

9. Is Sourceforge what we need ?

Mark: Bruce doesn't seem happy with sf, should we look at moving to
another repo. SF on svn seems to work well.
Bruce: Look at redmine.

10. Do we need a wiki and bug tracing system ?

  - is the one on Trac sufficient.

Mark: Should we use a different system.
Consensus is it seems to be working.
Ben: Can it be configured to send email when a trac entry is made.

11. Mailing list membership.

  - Should xorp-dev become the xorp committers list ?

Mark: Mailing lists are still at ICSI is this okay.
Ben: Is happy with things as they are.
Mark : xorp-hackers to be all discussions on technical issues,
xorp-dev just private list  for policy related issues e.g. a new
commiter

12. API stability.

Ben / Bruce : Not an issue at this point.

13. Boost usage

Ben : against boost
Bruce : for boost
Atanu : against boost
Bruce : Important set of tools for large systems.
Ben : Foot print size too big for large systems.
Mark : Not used it, but build time is significant, would prefer to
minimise external dependencies.
Mark : Bruce to write an email about what we'd gain from boost.

14. AOB

- mark suggested more regular calls.

Ben : as needed
Mark : Approximately a month then.

Notes : Minutes policy.
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1. Minutes will be written up and circulated to all those on the call
for corrections and amendments. Two working days will be allowed for
corrections.
2. Corrected minutes will be circulated. Two working days will be
allowed for corrections.
3. Minutes will be posted to xorp-hackers.