[4888] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2004-12-01 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Dec 1 14:36:31 2004
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:36:26 -0500
Message-Id: <200412011936.iB1JaQDo022981@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Attending: ghudson rbasch aurora wdc jweiss amb
1. Status report
(Sent separately.)
2. Metacity
We will be switching the default windowmanager from Sawfish to
Metacity because:
* Sawfish is orphaned.
* Sawfish is buggy as a result of being orphaned.
* Sawfish is more complicated than Metacity.
* Sawfish is slower than Metacity.
* Sawfish does not implement some usability features, such as
startup notification, which are implemented in Metacity.
Some work has already been done on making the Athena environment work
well in metacity. The transition will involve:
* Changing the default windowmanager to metacity.
* Adding a menu item under "Settings" to switch window managers,
using flag files to record the preference. (The WINDOW_MANAGER
environment variable will override this mechanism.)
* Users with a ~/.sawfish who log in on 9.4 will see a one-time
dialog warning them about the change and telling them how to
switch back if they want.
* Making metacity shut up about the lack of a session manager.
3. Bug-reporting
We would like bug reports to be in GForge. Issues:
* Bug reporting needs to work on dialup, but gforge.mit.edu does not
work with lynx.
* Right now "sendbug" gathers up information about the machine which
helps us understand the bug report better. We don't want to lose
that.
* Many of the bugs reported to us are about stuff maintained by
Alex.
Greg's original idea was to write a submitting app, but he was
convinced during the meeting that a mail gateway is a better plan.
The architecture will be something like:
* Mail sent to bugs@mit.edu will create a bug report in GForge.
* People currently subscribed to bugs@mit.edu will be moved to
another list, which sees GForge notifications about changes made
to the tracker. Replies to bug reports must be made through
GForge; the mail gateway will not attempt to recognize replies.
* Some amount of manual effort will be required to delete bug
reports resulting from spam.
One issue not covered by the meeting is authentication. Since mail is
unauthenticated, the bug reports entered by the mail gateway will
probably have a generic submitter field, but will have a monitor
attached to them for the real submitter's email address.
4. krb4 deprecation
If IS&T management gives the go-ahead for krb4 deprecation, then
presumably resources will be allocated to address the Athena apps
which use krb4 (Zephyr, OLC, Discuss, Moira).
