[libvirt] Planning for next release and discussions on project process

[Daniel Veillard]

  So we are around the end of the month, i.e. the time where I
usually come out and suggest to enter a freeze within a few days
for the next release.

  However, looking at the git history I note that we have only
around 125 patches commited since 0.8.7 was released and while I'm
fairly convinced that time based releases are a really good thing
(allowing people to see their patches out within a predictable
delay, and allowing the whole ecosystem of distros/users to plan
accordingly), it's also time I think to open up the process to the
growing (or at least changing) set of people involved in building
libvirt. I usually ask if everybody agrees on the next freeze but
I have to make the initial selection based on the calendar and
my own agenda (or Red Hat one).

  Other projects I know use things like weekly teleconferences to
discuss ther development plans, or IRC meetings. My opinion is that
phone is not alway convenient/eficient, IRC has the advantage of being
more open (no spoken english barrier), less intrusive, and it's
nearly trivial to extract and publish some kind of minutes. But both
suffer from the timezone problem, basically if there is meeting time
it's gonna be during insane hours for someone somewhere (we have a large
set of developpers in the US, Matthias and Dan are in Europe, Justin is
in Australia, I'm in China now and I think the Fujitsu developpers too)

  One possibility could be to use a mix of IRC channel gathering and
an Etherpad file (very convenient tool try it), I just created one at
   http://ietherpad.com/oETnXKdcFf
to try this out and put my own sugegstions, then others can come and
put their own feedback even if they happen to not be online at the
time of the meeting.

  To come back to the release, maybe we can do 2 release for Jan-Mar
since we didn't released early in Jan and Feb is short, so I would
suggest to plan a release before Feb 15, entering a freeze around the
7th Feb. This should allow to put in some of the code already reviewed
but not yet commited that I spotted:

  + migration enhancements from Hu Tao and Wen Congyang
  + integration of locking in the QEmu driver from Dan
  + cgroup blkio support (lxc and qemu) from Gui Jianfeng
  + smartcard support from Eric

 but there is certainly things I forgot, and well people may have
specific things they want in ASAP, so let's use IRC (irc.oftc.net #virt)
and
   http://ietherpad.com/oETnXKdcFf

  and share opinions about next release and features to come,
well unless people have a better idea on how to organize ourselves,

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
daniel at veillard.com  | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/