[6186] in Release_7.7_team
Re: On the subject of de-supporting Athena 10 sooner rather than later.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Fri Jan 30 15:36:11 2009
Cc: "gettes@mit.edu Gettes" <gettes@mit.edu>, release-team@mit.edu
Message-Id: <4DCF85BB-3EC7-438D-8831-1BFA9F3240A7@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <11AFAAEE-172D-48ED-8026-1A752659EBDE@mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:35:27 -0500
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> I think Athena Release Team is in the process of shifting mindset
> to, "Leave it old or broken in Athena 9 as incentive to go to Athena
> 10."
This mindset only works for people who know that Athena 9 and Athena
10 are two fundamentally different products, along the lines of MacOS
9 and MacOS 10. Currently, the people who know that are us and
SIPB. The community at large (especially the students) do not, and
they will not see "We're leaving Athena 9 broken to encourage
transition to Athena 10" - instead they will see "IS&T is leaving
Athena broken."
> We did take perhaps a bit too much new and useful stuff into Athena
> 9 over the past year. Sorry. We're changing.
I don't agree with the assertion that there was *too much* new stuff
added to Athena 9 over the past year. Looking over the releases, I
only see maintenance work (applying patches and bugfixes). The only
_new_ features added to Athena in the calendar year 2008 were:
* VMWare Player
* Improved Bash dotfile handling
* Support for the new Dell 2009WFP displays
Everything else was operating system updates, minor patch releases of
components such as AFS, bugfixes, and security updates.
I don't think maintenance of Athena 9 and development of Athena 10 are
mutually exclusive. I completely understand not spending any
significant amount of time on it and not adding any new features, but
surely we have to continue with vendor-supplied security updates until
well past 7/1/09 (I suggest 1/1/10 as a cutoff for vendor patches) We
can't just have an instantaneous cutover, particularly during the
summer when many machine owners may not be around to transition their
machines. We need time (I suggest 1 semester) to notify users and, if
necessary, assist them with the transition.
> The Athena Dialup service is a driver for keeping Solaris Security
> patches up to date and keeping Solaris Athena desktop applications
> up to date. If there is significant delay in deploying an Athena 10-
> based Dialup service, we need to choose among:
>
> 1. Continuing to do work to integrate Solaris updates. (Athena
> Dialup uses *Athena* Solaris as its basis.)
> 2. Continuing to do work creating Athena 9 updates to support
> Athena Dialup
> 3. Offering a moribund Athena 9 dialup service for a period of time.
> 4. Shutting down Athena Dialup for a period of time. (I can
> already hear Jonathan Reed and Oliver Thomas emphatically saying
> this is an unacceptable choice.)
> 5. Expediting creation of an Athena 10 Dialup service. SIPB has a
> prototype, they call it Linerva.
I think this topic merits a separate thread and I will reply to this
in more detail shortly.
-Jon
