[netnice-users] toward a new package release

[Takashi O. <ta...@cs...>]

dear netnice developers,

after several months' struggle, we are finishing initial porting task of 
FreeBSD4/Netnice, onto FreeBSD5, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. i think we can
release the alpha-patches for them in a month. Linux port and Mac OS X
port will follow soon in several months. and, i'm writing this message
to you, to make a decision about the alpha release.

as you know, netnice requires applications to realize fancy controlling
of network I/O on end-host. and, we are planning to add two applications
shortly to our application line-up: fwbuilder and libnetnice. firewall
builder is a nice-looking firewall rule builder with full GUI support,
and we can use the application to create firewall rule to set onto VIF.
the functionality is still primitive, but, it will be faster than existing
implementations, and we will extend its functionality soon. libnetnice is
a library to control network I/O, and we believe that it is the first
library that controls network I/O on end-host operating systems in a
platform independent manner and realizes control of network I/O for any
user application. (i know that there is a portable bandwidth limit library,
but i believe you know what i mean here.)

so, we have several new products, which would definitely make the project
much more attractive. however, the problem is that, since each of the
products is developed by different individuals, it is a bit difficult to
keep pace of all of the subprojects; some of them will be ready in a week,
some others may take a month more.

what i would like to know is, whether you want us to wait until all of
the products become ready, or you want to have a patch for your own
platform (FreeBSD5.3.1, maybe) ASAP? i'm personally thinking that, the
complete package would be a bit better, since we can save the number of
advertisement posts to related mailing lists. otherwise, we need to post
messages whenever some of the pieces become ready, which might be
annoying to subscribers not interested in the project. (right?)

so, do you prefer to have a complete package which includes everything?
or, do you want to have a patch for your current platform (FreeBSD5.3.1,
maybe) ASAP? 

i would appreciate any feedback, comments, and opinions. please vote,
if you can.

	http://www.netnice.org/pukiwiki-e.php?packaging%20strategy

thanks!


-- taka

p.s.

i have just created a new ML, netnice-library, for the discussion of
libnetnice. please join us, to discuss its specification. thanks!