[1942] in Release_7.7_team
minutes, 9/29
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Wed Sep 29 16:21:29 1999
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:17:57 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199909292017.QAA151872@antharia.mit.edu>
From: Dan Winship <danw@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Attending: rbasch, ghudson, kcr, danw, wdc, tb, jweiss, ajfox, othomas
1) Irix 6.5 crashes
Some Irix 6.5 machines have been hanging, then coming back up with
0-length passwd, group, and CellServDB, which makes it impossible to
log in on them, and makes them panic when they try to start AFS.
There's an attempt to work around the problem in 8.3.13 (by not
copying over those files unless they've changed, so they're less
likely to end up damaged after rebooting).
Bob has been trying to get a crash dump out of one. (tc-indy has been
hung for a month. He's going to look at it.)
Someone (Bob?) will submit patches to make the startup sequence try to
replace passwd, group, and CellServDB if they're zero-length, as
another workaround.
2) sendmail.cf
The athena.mit.edu MX record is being repointed to outgoing.mit.edu,
which does not allow mail with unqualified envelope from addresses.
This means pre-8.0 workstations will no longer be able to send mail.
Postmaster sent mail to known owners of old workstations with a patch
to fix this.
Jonathon suggests patching the sendmail.cf on the old packs: old
machines would pick up the new sendmail.cf because of NEWMAILCF
without us needing to put out a patch release.
No one objects, so he'll do it for "the last version of each
previously supported platform" (but not for older versions of Solaris
and Irix).
3) Athena Desktop
We've done some work. We want to make a prototype to show to
directors, etc.
What Athena has now:
- menus (Dash)
- initial xterm
- windowmanager (mwm)
- console window
- logout button
What we want:
- aesthetic appeal / modernization *
- toolbar (with menus, applets, etc) *
- menus *
- more stuff in system menus
- easier for users to add things
- logout button in toolbar *
- file manager (like we have on the SGIs) *
- with icons for removable media
- should use "delete", not "rm"
- should know about AFS acls
- should know about lockers?
- windowmanager (still Windows-like enough to be obvious) *
- Help browser that pops up on first login to be helpful *
- console window (can't really get rid of it, at least at this stage) *
- maybe rewritten in GTK "with doodadery"
- initial xterm (probably) *
- Athena control panel
- "gkerberometer"
- GNOME/GTK versions of other apps
- OLC (a student has been working on this) *?
- Discuss
- Zephyr (send/receive/zctl)
*ed items are things we'd like to have in the prototype
Issues:
- Dash allows documentation attached to menu items. GNOME Panel
allows "tips", but they're more obtrusive, especially if they're
very large.
- GNOME still has stability problems...
- Athena Documentation vs GTK Themes. ("the picture shows a red bar
with a gray X, but all I have is this black bar with a white X!"
As the example suggests, this may just be paranoia...)
- GNOME Terminal vs xterm vs eterm
- "Days to login" (how slow is it on the slowest machines)
- Some software only likes 4Dwm
Dan will do most of the development stuff to get the prototype ready.
Thomas will deal with the "aesthetics" part (hopefully an MIT theme).
Karl will also do bits.
After some discussion, we agree that we will properly Discover the
Athena Desktop. Karl will lead the team, Greg will write the report.
Vijay will presumably be the sponsor. Greg will talk to Vijay and Greg
(Anderson) and maybe Bob and Roger.
Timeline(ish):
- prototype / discovery
(further steps assume the discovery team gives it a go)
- integrate sources into the source tree
- update documentation (paper and online)
- have a way for people to use it before it appears in a release
- release (hopefully 8.4, unless it drags more than we're expecting)
4) Private Workstations
In the wake of the Athena Desktop decision, the "fixing private
workstations" project then suddenly flies up out of nowhere and also
turns into a Discovery Project, to be led by Dan.
