[2934] in Release_7.7_team
Athena Release Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Sep 7 17:14:49 2001
Message-ID: <wvaHX5pz0001IJAq9I@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 21:14:45 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU, delivery-council@MIT.EDU
Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Development
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: For period ending 31 August 2001
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
This is our first "monthly" status report, so we're going to report
significant events of the recent past:
Accomplishments up to July 31, 2001:
We shipped the Athena 9.0 release incorporating OS upgrades on the
Linux platform (From Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 7.1) and on the Solaris
Platform (from 32 bit Solaris 7 to 64 bit Solaris 8) and
incorporating a new look and feel based on the GNOME toolkit
incorporating a replacement for Dash, and a new window manager
replacing mwm. This deliverable was the culmination of the previous
year's work.
Accomplishments past period:
* After giving up on the quest for a helper for the 9.0 roll-out, a
very promising candidate was re-admitted to MIT as a student. We
have offered him term-time student employment, and expect he'll join
us and help us with important bug fixing.
* Deployed Athena Patch Release 9.0.14 incorporating many small bug
fixes to 9.0 and security fixes for AFS and telnetd.
(Detail:http://www.mit.edu:8008/menelaus/release-announce/109)
* Deployed Athena Patch Release 8.4.26 incorporating security fixes
for AFS and telnetd for customers who did not adopt 9.0.
(Detail:http://www.mit.edu:8008/menelaus/release-announce/111)
* Deployed Athena Patch Release 9.0.15/16 the following significant,
user-visible enhancements/fixes:
Solaris speedup by putting more of Athena on local disk.
Private Linux systems with SMP kernels supported.
Linux update enhanced to explicit lists of:
locally installed rpms to update
locally installed rpms NEVER to touch.
Remedy for Solaris inappropriately failing to find host addresses.
(Detail:http://www.mit.edu:8008/menelaus/release-announce/113)
* Kerberized NFS problem diagnosed. TODO: code/test/ship a fix.
Goals for the coming period:
*Patch release with:
Solaris Patches requested by customers.
Support for Sun Netra T1 hardware
* Plan which EC3 topics to pursue.
* Get a presentation on one of the chosen EC3 topics.
* Review long range project plans.
(Draft: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/projects.html)
* A required change to the Athena build process to have it build in
a chroot'ed environment.
(Rationale:http://www.mit.edu:8008/menelaus/source-developers/414)
* Announce proposed feature set/work plan for Athena 9.1 and begin
process of getting feedback on it.
Issues:
* The team knows that "Athena" is slated to get a broader
definition. We expect to be a participant in the evolution of that
new definition, and to make sure that the UNIX Platform Team work is
properly aligned with that definition.
* The team is embarked on work with Tom Thornton and the Delivery
Council to understand long-term resourcing for the UNIX platform
work.
* The team has gotten the message that its efforts in the past have
not been well enough communicated, nor possibly influenced enough by
appropriate IS leadership. The team is actively involved in
addressing this issue in cooperation with Tom Thornton.
Key learnings:
Team dynamics:
Just fine and dandy.
Additional comments:
This Status Report will be refined in response to feedback from
readers. I've tried to balance brevity with completeness. I hope
people find the URLs that point at more detailed documentation
useful. I've probably included too many this time around, but I
want to give readers an opportunity to come up to speed with what
documentation we've been producing but not knowing how to
appropriately share it.
