SMGL Developer Meeting (Nov. 11th, 2007)

Here is the summary from the latest Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer Meeting. It was held in the #sourcemage-admin irc channel.

Everyone gathered around the SMGL crystal ball and the discussion began. The first order of business revolved around the Cauldron Team. If you are new to Source Mage, the Cauldron involves the ISO. Cauldron Lead Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann stated they were scaling back to simpler installer schemes until they can get a regular release schedule started again. The current ISO generation system is too complicated.

BearPerson introduced a new developer, Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer. Flux has been getting accustomed to the current Cauldron setup and working on rolling out a test ISO. Flux said he may have a new test ISO ready this week if things go as planned.

The Cauldron Team will focus on i486 and others as that's the basic install, but they will do their best to get an x64 ISO out as well once they get things going again. The version of the ISO has not yet been determined.

Several developers offered to test a x64 version of the ISO. BearPerson said once they move ahead he will post a mailing list announcement about x64 development, so anyone willing to help will be able to volunteer then.

The next discussion centered around the Grimoire. The Grimoire is our collection of spells or software. Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall started by mentioning the current influx of new developers. With the newest being Vlad "Enqlave" Glagolev. Enqlave has been a SMGL user for about 4 years, but decided to join us as a developer.

Eric said his free time lately has been lacking and this has caused the new stable grimoire releases to suffer. He mentioned that timelines are slipping, the developer list is not being purged according to policy and bugs are being submitted faster than they are being fixed. Developers stated that maybe the project was growing quickly as of late and that the bug count is pretty stable and not too far out of hand.

Ruskie said he would contact the idle developers to check their status to help with determining inactivity. Sandalle will fix the timelines by looking for volunteers much sooner, as in right after the prior release at the latest. As for the bug list, he will be going through it to find outstanding bugs and point them out or at least give feedback on the bugs so the user knows we're aware of it. He wants the bug count to decrease and not increase. Jaka "lynx" Kranjc volunteered to help Sandalle with the bugs, because he already has a good understanding of their status. Lynx said for stable we need to revert/fix this hal/hal-info bug, some integrations remain. Lynx will become the gatekeeper for this to facilitate things.

General grimoire developers are still needed. The current influx is welcome and more are definitely needed. Project Lead Jeremy "emrys" Blosser said all things considered he is still happy with how stable grimoire releases have been relative to other things.

Sandalle also stated he would like to find more developers to take over a section, as some sections seem to get ignored. While general devs pick up a few here and there, the section developers primary task is to check for bugs in that section and get them fixed. But the main need for section devs is not updates per-se, but bug triage. Feel free to send Sandalle an e-mail if you'd like a section.

Lynx added he would like to express some awe at our diligent grimoire updaters, especially Treeve Jelbert, Ladislav "lace" Hagara and George "p3pilot" Sherwood!

Lastly, Bugzilla needs updated. Emrys will update things like Bugzilla when he moves it to the other datacenter if not before. The move will happen when Emrys has the time to make the move.

Next on the list was Sorcery. Sorcery is our package management system. Sorcery Lead Jaka "lynx" Kranjc reported devel received a few fixes, but not in the blocker category. The focus is still on the new stable and the weird regression blocking it. He is investigating it further. Once this is fixed, version 1.14 of Sorcery will get all of the attention. Also, user Anmaster cleaned up half of the bashdoc pipeline and it now produces valid xhtml with css support. So the goal of having the APIs somewhere on the web site is closer.

Emrys then asked to hear from the Tome side of things. Currently there is no Tome Lead developer, but work has been taking place. Tome is our documentation and web site area. Developers like Ruskie have been moving the data from the Drupal side of things to the MoinMoin wiki. Ruskie said user Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has been helping with that. Most of the project related things(policy, developers etc...) have been transferred to the wiki under the SourceMage/ hierachy, but we still need to transfer the docs and any other possible pages that are around. Other than that he urges people to look over drupal pages and see if they can move one or two pages. That would help the whole effort much more easily.

Emrys then reported about his projects. Mainly, stability, delegation and mail lists. For delegation he needs to get the script done so component leads can add their own own git repositories. He has started this already, by adding Ruskie's licenses repository and making the script as he goes, so stuff doesn't get missed. The other thing he needs to do with git is move some repos around so we can add the p4 history ones back in without spamming the list. The mailing list stuff he mentioned is a priority for him because it's the big block keeping him from catching back up with things. The developers determined the section aliases could be dropped to help with this.

Emrys had this to say about the server move. "I'm still planning to piggyback building this new server on some similar stuff I'm doing at work. Which is taking a break for the LISA conference this week but will be happening the week after that. Once it's done at work I can spend a weekend day doing it for us and then schedule some services downtime to move things as they're ready. I don't intend to move Drupal. There's a decent chance I can make time during the move to set up fudforums though. I do intend to get things like bugzilla and moinmoin updated on the move. On the ML front, do we have anyone completely wedded to the idea of using mailman? It's not fun from an admin perspective, there are much better options for automation and integration with other stuff. I want to move us to one of those that mostly uses email for administration, still with web archives of course, but provide a web interface at least for some admin."

Ruskie reminded Emrys there is a vote pending for a lead developer status for Paul "novaburst" Beel. Emrys went ahead and sent the e-mail about this to the mailing list. It was also determined that Tome Lead nominations needed to happen. Emrys will do nominations for Tome Lead next week.

To finish the meeting a rather large discussion involved the direction of the web site. The wiki needs access control. In the end, it was decided that we would do it by using git to handle the backend of the wiki. David Kowis confirmed the move by posting this on the official site: The next server we'll be migrating too will no longer have drupal on it. Reason: no one maintains it. And it's more than we need. We'll simply lean on Mage Power! for all our news-y-ish things. We haven't come up with a forums replacement yet. We'll migrate to using the wiki for everything.

That concludes the meeting notes. It was an informative meeting and well attended. Great job Mages!