[Server-devel] Planning for XS-0.6

[Martin Langhoff]

To help my planning for 0.6, looked at the items in trac and in the
'XS moodle roadmap' wikipage, and grouped them thus - in no particular
order...:

 - Infrastructure of the XS distro
 - Network infrastructure (including things like bind and proxies)
 - Installation
 - Management/Deployment (including XS mgmt scripts as well as serving
leases for the XO)
 - Failsafe improvements
 - Docs
 - Infrastructural parts Moodle (UI for infrastructure / admin tools)
 - Education and content tools (Moodle's teaching tools, wikislices)
 - Scaling up (ejabberd ssl patches for lower mem usage,
mod_roster->moodle, tuning of memory usage...)

this is a rough grouping, naturally several things belong to more than
one group, and there's plenty of interdependencies. In short, not
entirely clearcut, but very useful to understand what kind of work we
have ahead, and what themes we can choose to focus on.

The XS 0.6 dev cycle is going to cover what's left of Nov and all of
December. It's not much time, and we have 2 deployments happening
around the new year. Talking with Greg Smith, Reuben and others
involved in deployments, the clear priorities coming up are

 - A pilot with large schools in Rwanda
 - A large number of schools in Peru

So in my eyes, it makes sense to prioritise aroung the following themes

 - Infrastructural parts Moodle (we need UI and tools)
 - Management/Deployment, with focus on XS management tools and lease mgmt
 - Scaling up - the target is schools with 3K users

This is just a statement of main focus and priorities. I do hope to
move forward on the other fronts and it'll be great if anyone can help
me! For example, there is a thousand little things we can do to make
the install/upgrade process smoother and more reliable, and we'll chip
away at those as well.

I feel we're still a bit behind, a bit chased by urgencies. Which is
to say -- I'd love to have more freedom to decide general direction,
but that will come when "infrastructural feature X must work...
tomorrow!" panics are over. It's not that far away, once we have
lease/activation and scalability issues resolved, there will be more
room.

So I'm very keen on hearing about ideas and local priorities perhaps
with an eye cast to 0.7, where I hope we'll be a bit freer. Of course,
if you can help a bit and you have other priorities, you can make your
feature happen in time for 0.6 too (and I'll try my darndest to help!)
:-)

cheers,



martin
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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