[Cerowrt-devel] next cerowrt release plan (of sorts)

[Dave Taht]

I took a few days off to get back to the east coast, take care of a
few family matters, and visit culturecon 2012 in Philly and Boston,
where I learned that "agile" had established a theoretical framework
around few things I was already doing (continuous integration,
engagement with testers and users, short development cycles, small
feature improvements, etc), that might guide some of my future
behavior around this project.

I liked very much the concept of just dealing with a small backlog of
items for a given 2 week (or less) scrum. It makes the overwhelming
backlog of 150 bugs in the cerowrt db along with coping with the
prospect of having to fix 2,000,000,000 machines in the long run a
little less overwhelming!

I have a backlog of related reading to do...

While I didn't drink all the kool-aid at the conferences, (I was
attracted to the kanban concept, and need to think about the
sociocratic principles as outlined in:
http://www.amazon.com/We-People-Consenting-Deeper-Democracy/dp/0979282705
) I did meet a lot of interesting people and got a chance to exercise
the non-coding portion of my brain a bit.

So while I did that and tried to also deal with the funding floor
problem, I did get some bits of cerowrt done

+ updated quagga and babeld to git head
+ Merge with openwrt, which contains a major upgrade to
wireless-compat and the usual ream of bug fixes
+ Fixed yet another CVE in bind
+ Added aiccu and ipset back into the build. I don't know when ipset
vanished, sorry about that.


- Along the way I managed to break opkg support. I note that a very
important and out-of-openwrt tree feature has been in cerowrt for a
while - that of the ability to sign packages, added by stephen walker
a while back. Due to the need for manual intervention to actually sign
packages, I've never actually used it, and now both opkg and opkg
with-signing are broken as I write in the main trees. Apologies.

My own focus for this release is to be able to A/B the current linux
codel and the ns2 implementation I put in the last cerowrt release in
the same firmware, to determine (after lots of testing!) which is
better. I've also burned a lot of time trying to come up with a
wfq_codel, that uses a codel implementation with a few single fifio
assumptions removed and some saner support for a background queue for
things like bittorrent. There will also need to be patches to
iproute2. Getting those kernel modules and iproute2 patches done is my
personal blocker for getting a new release out. Simultaneously I plan
on getting an x86 version of the kernel done on 3.6-rcX....

I'd like very much to get aqm-scripts/simple_qos.sh actually pulling
data from the luci web page and conf file, too, but find my own gui
and uci skills lacking. anyone? I find the qos-script's usage of awk
and sh to be impossible to understand and would prefer to just come up
with something in lua that could do the job - particularly as I'd like
to be able to A/B/C the various variants of the underlying algos via
remote control on the testbed boxes.... but I don't care how it
interfaces, just so that (someone!) comes up with an interface.


Other things in my backlog are two multicast responder-like daemons -
but can't remember their names mldna?
Need to give gw.home.lan a DNS entry for dnsmasq


The code name for this release attempt is "sugarland" -  see
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4566 for details

I'm shooting for wednesday.
If you have trivial feature requests, please make 'em now!
If you have code you want to check in, please get them in by tuesday!


-- 
Dave Täht