[Server-devel] What's cooking in the XS pot this week (2008-10--01)

[Greg Smith]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the update!

Its great to see all the items planned for or in 0.5:
http://dev.laptop.org/query?status=assigned&status=closed&status=new&status=reopened&order=priority&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=component&milestone=xs-0.5


On your question of who is waiting for XS 0.5, I know of at least two 
deployments that are building labs and testing configurations with XS 
software:

Paraguay
Birmingham

Both will need a stable XS that they can use ASAP. Whether they will go 
with XS 0.5 or not depends on what 0.5 includes, when 0.6 will be 
available and what it includes.

AFAIK Moodle is not a must have item for either deployment.

A stable and scalable eJabber is critical as are basic XS features like:
- Caching
- Filtering (is DanGuardian built in and shipped with the XS ?)
- NAT

Birmingham may start using XOs and an XS in schools in mid-Novemeber. 
Paraguay will probably start later but we should lock down their version 
ASAP as they want lead time to really flush out all issue in the lab.

They may both use the backup and restore feature if they have enough 
disk on the server (of course they will use it whether they like it or 
not as you can't turn it off :-).

I think there other deployments that will want to use a school server 
before the end of 2008. Two other features which may tip the balance for 
deployments are upgrade of XO images and activities via school server 
cache (Peru).

Spending a little more time to make sure that XS 0.5 is very stable and 
well documented is a good idea. However, we should start to be more 
precise about the features and dates for each release we plan to deliver 
before the end of CY 08.

Thanks,

Greg S


Martin Langhoff wrote:
> Overall, XS 0.5 is looking shaping up nicely... and late. The F9 port
> took quite a bit more time to get finished off, perhaps because I
> tried too hard to get it work relatively well, and uncovered a whole
> lot of problems with it -- it was a good thing to do as we now have
> fixes for all of them (mostly thanks to an very responsive Fedora
> community), but it sure took time.
> 
> Luckily, nobody is waiting for 0.5 -- not that we know of! do mention
> it if a delay of 0.5 impacts on your deployment -- so we'll take a bit
> more time to finish off the Moodle bits, SOTP and mapping out the
> ejabberd configuration.
> 
> The idea is that XS-0.5 and later XS-0.6 should be the preferred
> pairing for XO-8.2, still uses the same interfaces as 0.4, but it does
> a whole lot more. Good nice features built on top of what we have will
> come with XS-0.6.
> 
> This week and next I am working on Moodle from various a Moodle
> conferences -- my email traffic moves a bit to the moodle.org forums,
> unfortunately I can't CC those easily here. I might post a summary
> with links to interesting threads - but I'd recommend that people
> subscribe to 'Using Moodle' > 'General Developer Forum', which is
> effectively 'moodle-dev' :-)
> 
> Some notes from last week:
> 
> - My week was focused on getting Moodle on the XS.  Some progress
> around installation, configuration and themes, still a lot to go. (Was
> a short week anyway, I ran away for a long weekend sailing :-) )
> 
> - Douglas Bagnall spent quite a bit of the week trying to work out what
> resources ejabberd uses in various circumstances.  Things did not
> always go his way, but he is getting there.  At other times he fixed
> some remaining issues related to the leap from Fedoras 7 to 9, and in
> spare moments he worked on bug #8610 ("Theme music for the XS") which
> might be opened as a competition once 8.2 is out of the way.  On
> Friday he helped the Wellington testers update the XO pool to build
> 764, which had handily been announced just a few minutes before.
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> martin