Hi, all Since GNOME 2.16 has been branched, and we'll move to work on GNOME 2.17 by and by, the GNOME ARC team think that it's high time we sat together and discussed about the process of GNOME 2.18 ARC.
We need volunteers to help out, ANYONE in the open-Solaris community will be greatly welcome, especially non-sun-employees. For those who are not familiar with Sun's ARC process please refer to http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/ .[1] After we get the volunteers list, we'll call a meeting (maybe on IRC) to discuss about details, and talk about how to make use of experiences in GNOME 2.16 ARC for a better GNOME 2.18 review. I have worked out a initial task list, comments are appreciated. * As always: a One-pager has to be written. I'd like to take the responsibility. * Information about new projects to be included in GNOME 2.18. Some projects with minor functionality and interface changes should better be covered an umbrella ARC case (a.k.a the GNOME 2.18 case). the project leads of any new are responsible to determine how their project will be taken through the ARC process. If the project lead wants to include ARC materials in the umbrella case rather than submitting a separate ARC case, it is the project leads responsibility to ensure that the materials are provided to the umbrella case owner with enough time for inclusion. * Collect information about new interfaces of existing projects. We can get such information from the leads of the projects. The sooner the better to have this info at hand. Interface table will be compile accordingly. In an umbrella case, I think it would be better to draw a clear dividing line between brand new projects (which are introduced into GNOME after the 2.16 case) and interface changes of existing projects (which means that the projects exists in the GNOME 2.16 ARC case but interfaces of them have somehow been changed), to give the reviewers a more clear idea. * New contracts has to be signed, mainly for new projects. But there might be new imported interfaces for existing projects too. * We should consider what we could do to more fully/completely ARC the GNOME project. For example, we haven't in the past given full attention to changes with CLI interfaces. For example, when new arguments are added to a command, it should be mentioned in the ARC materials. Perhaps this could be automated so changes could be discovered via running a script rather than checking by hand? GConf key usage is another area we haven't documented as well as we perhaps should. We haven't included such information in the past because we haven't had enough volunteers to consider ARC'ing every change in these areas. If we had more volunteers then perhaps we could do more than we have done in the past. Excellent work has been done before, especially for GNOME 2.16 which was approved during inception review with no TCRs (still something to celebrate). Let's work together for a greater success. [1] For those who are interested, previous case numbers of GNOME is 2005/734 for GNOME 2.12, GNOME ARC are 2006/202 for GNOME 2.14 and 2006/462 for GNOME 2.16. You can find details in "ARC Case Archives". --Brian/Irene
