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Hi guys!

On Thursday Lech and I had a talk where we decided to - finally -
release the latest and greatest version of NAIS to SourceForge.net as
version 1.0.  To get this done in a reasonable time frame, Lech and I
would like to meet next weekend in Cologne to set things up and
distribute the workload (and we might already release some bits and
pieces).

Mattias: do you have time to take part in the meeting personally, or
do you prefer the regular electronic channels for contributing?

Some details about the infrastructure as well as the release and its time frame:

= Infrastructure =

I propose we use the already set up site at sourceforge.net for this.
Sourceforge has had its issues in the past, but IMO now offers pretty
much everything one needs: MantisBT, MediaWiki, git, Bazaar,
Mercurial, LimeSurvey, etc. pp.

As first step I changed the project configuration so that the project
site displays only what we actually use (or what I think is
appropriate to use):

* Mailman: deleted the lists nais-devel (had mostly spam) and
nais-announce (no need), re-created nais-develop

* CVS: migrated to SVN, linked post-commit to nais-commits. We might
choose to switch to a distributed vcs, I personally prefer hg.

* Tracker: the default sourceforge issue tracker is disabled now, trac
is enabled (see below).

* trac: I propose we use trac as wiki, roadmap tool, and issue
tracker. Besides being lightweight (and pretty cool) the people at
sourceforge use it themselves, so support for it should be pretty good
in the long run. At DLR we use MantisBT (which offers more from the BT
perspective) but for NAIS a lightweight tool like trac seems more than
sufficient to me.

Please note, for the SourceForge version of trac two features are
currently broken: [1] mentions that XML/RPC doesn't work, so you can't
integrate trac in Eclipse Mylyn right now. [2] describes problems with
modifying trac.ini through the web interface, so updates to bugs
cannot be sent to the nais-develop mailing list automatically for now.
Both issues are planned to be fixed during May by the SourceForge.net
team, as mentioned in the above bug reports.

= NAIS Release =

As written above, the 1.0 release will start with what's available
right now. We need to prepare the user-site, the developer-site and
the release itself.

== User Site ==

The user site will be at [3], it should be the starting point for all
users who whish to do something with NAIS. So it will  probably
contain the following:

* A quick-start howto for setting up a server as well as installing
Debian/Ubuntu clients,

* the chapters from Lech's thesis with some supporting rationale,

* relevant LDAP GUI-software to use on the server backend

* and some ready-to-use VirtualBox or VMware images (for setting up a server).

Should we use a Wiki as home page (with a redirect to [4]) or have
something decent, good looking (like Lazarus)?

Personally, I like a decent web site more than a Wiki. In a Java-based
project of mine I use Maven Doxia to generate a web site. The content
of the site may be described using a wiki-language (.apt) or using
some xml dialects. So if we choose the latter I could provide the
generator without much ado, the content would then be edited through
Subversion (and probably auto-generated as post-commit). For something
good looking the CSS would need to be updated (but I have a simple CSS
for starters).

== Developer Site ==

I propose we use trac [4] as developer site that contains things like
how to set up a proper environment for developing NAIS, how everything
integrates into d-i and debconf, how LDAP schema definition works, and
the like.

This way we could provide both: a decent user documentation as well as
everything new members would need to join our team.

== NAIS Release ==

I plan to have the first v1.0 release ready by May 15th. Here are just
some random thoughts also worth noting:

* The v1.0 release should contain mostly the latest and greatest stuff
from Lech.

* The configuration updates for recent Debian (5.0) and Ubuntu (10.04)
versions should be provided through a minor release upgrade.

* What's with providing debian packages? Do we want to provide any of
these? When?

* LDAP client: should we provide copies of working clients for
interacting with LDAP, or just reference them?

* VirtualBox server image: available with v1.0 or later?

So: what do you think?

I think we have something substantial to offer here, we just should
get it out to the public. Because of the underlying concepts of NAIS
(i.e. relying on debconf and d-i for performing the actual
installation) we have a pretty generic scheme. This scheme should have
litle problems to adjust to new versions of Debian/Ubuntu that break
with the current installation scheme (like recent Ubuntu versions did
for FAI [5]).

All the best,
Jens

[0] https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/
[1] https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/1416
[2] https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/6259
[3] http://nais.sf.net/
[4] https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/nais
[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fai/+bug/338157

-- 
ruehmkorf at gmail dot com

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