[4135] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2003-12-03 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Dec 3 14:22:36 2003
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 14:22:33 -0500
Message-Id: <200312031922.OAA03376@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Attending: ghudson wdc aurora zacheiss amb jweiss rbasch miki
1. Linux distributions
Here's how the pieces currently lie:
RHEL is expected to have superior support and stability. Security
patches will be available for five years after a release comes out,
and hardware updates and fixes will be available for 2.5-3 years.
Fedora is likely to require upgrades to new versions of packages in
order to get fixes and security updates.
A student-only RHEL site license would apparently cost $2500, which is
well within our budget. We need to convince them to charge us not too
much more than that to cover non-students, and also to convince them
not to make us try to robustly count how many non-students are using
it.
A 12-18 month release schedule is not ideal for us, but we've been
dealing with that for Solaris, and the current and next releases are
timed well for us. Also, frequent hardware updates will reduce most
of the pressure to be running the most current major release.
If RHEL negotiations break down and Fedora is too frightening, we
still have the alternative of going with another RPM-based Linux
distribution.
2. Ongoing projects
Installing Athena software with pkgadd on Solaris: Significant
progress. miki has produced a document at
http://web.mit.edu/miki/design.html giving the current state of her
plan.
ifplugd and neat integration for disconnected operation: Delayed.
athadmin: Greg is working on prototyping such a thing. It may require
making a separate hesiod cluster for cluster Linux workstations so
that we know not to put up an athadmin window when someone logs in as
root on a cluster machine.
3. Mozilla
If Mozilla 1.6 comes out soon, we will upgrade to it for IAP. This
will help us make Mozilla mail do SMTP authentication.
We will also have the MIT CA pre-installed in Mozilla in the next
patch release, independent of whether we update it.
4. Status
Under separate cover.
