[Server-devel] New architect and roadmap - and phone

[Greg Smith (gregmsmi)]

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" <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>
Subject: [Server-devel] New architect and roadmap - and phone
	conference
To: server-devel <server-devel at lists.laptop.org>
Cc: Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org>
Message-ID:
	<46a038f90803211623v5655719er9ca3427b76fae916 at mail.gmail.com>
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
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> 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
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmai.com - martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff