[2993] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2001-10-03 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Oct 3 15:04:05 2001
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 15:03:59 -0400
Message-Id: <200110031903.PAA04604@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Attending: ghudson zacheiss miki wdc othomas ajfox rbasch aurora amb wdc jweiss
1. 9.0.17 lossage
GX150s hung trying to take the 9.0.17 patch release (at the "kudzu -q"
at the end). Several reasons why we got blindsided by this:
* The USB enabling code was never lab-tested as it would be run in
the field, and the problem only happens when you run "kudzu -q" on
a machine which is already running without the appropriate USB
driver.
* We don't have many GX150s in the dev cell.
* The few GX150s which did fail to take the update were blamed on
network or power problems, so there were no bug reports.
Andrew will be aware of this kind of problem and will check for it.
We will try to put more GX150s on staff members' desks, and perhaps
pay more attention to hardware diversity among testing machines in the
future.
2. 9.1 projects
We went over the 9.1 projects list. Here is the status:
chroot build - done
GUI mail client - ghudson; in progress
krb5 upgrade - rbasch
BIND 9 upgrade - ghudson
OpenAFS source import - zacheiss; will begin December/January
Nautilus - amb; in progress
OS upgrades - see below
Linux install improvements - amb
cnboot in stock Solaris - wdc; may be futile
Normally, we would upgrade to Solaris 9 and Red Hat 7.2 next summer,
starting work in February. However, because of the filesystem issues
with ext2, we are strongly considering upgrading to Red Hat 7.2 this
IAP, since it contains ext3 support. Given the current workload
distribution, ghudson would probably do most of the work. For this to
happen, we need Red Hat 7.2 to come out roughly by mid-November.
There are two reasonable ways we could handle version numbers:
* We could call the Red Hat 7.2 upgrade a patch release. (Linux is
the only platform we could get away with this on.)
* We could have Athena 9.1 on Linux and Athena 9.0 on the other
platforms. Users might find that a little confusing.
3. Zephyr GUI
Heather will contact the usability team and see if they can send
someone to the release team meeting in two weeks. Greg will prepare
binaries of the two GUI zephyr clients (the ariels one and the nsanch
one) to demonstrate. The goal is to pick which zephyr client, if any,
should go into the release, and what changes need to be made to its
interface.
4. Mail clients
Right now Greg is leaning towards Evolution.
People who deal with other platforms would like the Mozilla mail
client to be considered. The main problem is that Mozilla does not
support Kerberos and therefore requires the password to be retyped to
connect to the IMAP server; this is pretty much a non-starter.
5. Linux install
alex_c has created an install process wherein the user does a stock
Red Hat install (with an AFS cache partition) and runs a shell script
which runs a python script. This makes a reasonable stopgap for
machines which can't install Red Hat 6.2 and can't use the IS
installer.
In terms of what we offer, we should focus on an installer which works
on dual-boot machines and supports diverse hardware. After we have
that, we could consider adopting something like Alex's script as a
stopgap for situations where we don't yet have a real installer for
the new release.
6. Kerberos, AFS components
Bill wanted to reexamine the project to create separately installable
Kerberos and AFS components. As before, the technical delivery work
is easy but the support and service issues are hard.
7. Linux on the Desktop discovery
There is a discovery project starting for Linux on the desktop. They
invited someone from the release team to join the discovery team.
Several members volunteered to participate by email, and Bill will
join the discovery team.
