[3000] in Release_7.7_team
Athena Release Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Oct 3 22:45:52 2001
Message-ID: <8viwpQJz000105QpVA@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 02:45:48 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU, delivery-council@MIT.EDU, ops@MIT.EDU
Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Development
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 10/3/01
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
Accomplishments past period:
*Patch release with:
Solaris Patches requested by customers.
Support for Sun Netra T1 hardware
* Plan which EC3 topics to pursue.
* Reviewed long range project plans.
(Draft: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/projects.html)
o The plans were reviewed by the team and by Tom Thornton.
o A new mini-project plan describing Email client work under
consideration was called for, and drafted.
(http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/plans/email-client.html)
o Some review was made of the question "What to do to get
'Distribute AFS' and 'Distribute Kerberos' projects out the door (See
Issues section below.)
* Email client work: Discussed issue of UNIX email client with Owls.
reviewed and published a draft of a transition plan
(http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/plans/email-transition.html)
and the beginnings of an analysis of candidate GUI clients.
(http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/plans/email-candidates.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)
* Announced proposed feature set/work plan for Athena 9.1 and begin
process of getting feedback on it. Published draft at:
(http://web.mit.edu/release/www/9.1-featureset.html)
* Coded a Sun patch to compute partition tables to eliminate having
to hand-add an entry every time Sun releases a new disk.
Goals for the coming period:
* Get a presentation on one of the chosen EC3 topics.
* Check in on Mozilla developments (Netscape-6 tech-watch)
* Check in on Star Office 6 Beta developments (Star Office tech-watch)
* Demonstrate tangible progress on Hardware Diversity project.
* Test and go live with (if tests successful) the automatic Sun
partitioning code.
* Propose a GUI Email client to Owls for consideration.
* Have a meeting with the Usability Team to discuss GUI Zephyr
clients. (There are two pre-existing candidate systems to review.
There is also an interest in comparing UNIX GUI Zephyr clients with
win-zephyr.)
Issues:
The recent Linux Patch release had a problem that affected many machines
that we did not detect in testing. We're re-examining how we test so
that we will reduce the chance of this happening again.
In proposing to offer Kerberos and AFS as separate packages for
individual loading, a larger issue has arisen: Who signs off on the
support issues? Answering end-user questions about Athena as a
homogenous whole has been the focus in the past. There has never been a
ramp-up of additional support resources for hand-holding on compponent
install issues.
There may be other components besides AFS and Kerberos desired by
customers for separate installation. What team has the official
sign-off on new products added?
Key learnings:
Team dynamics:
Additional comments:
wdc spent a lot of time over the past month writing web pages. He will
probably not be so prolific next month. :-)
