Hi all,
I discussed our current development with James and he agreed we need to change
it. Therefore I'm organizing an open IRC meeting where we'll discuss what
changes to make and how. James will of course be attending:
Place: #openvpn at irc.freenode.net
Time: Tuesday 12th Jan 19:00 UTC (20:00 MET, 21:00 EEST, 11AM PST, 2PM EST)
Duration: 1 hour (or more)
Here's an outline of current plans - thanks to all who've provided ideas and
feedback so far. It's been very valuable!
- Clearly separate the goals of the OSS project and our product ("Access
server") to avoid unnecessary conflicts. The goal is to be able to develop
OpenVPN as openly as possible without hurting our product. The goals of OpenVPN
project should be discussed openly later on.
- (We) Allocate enough time to the OSS project to keep it moving along.
- In general follow the Linux kernel development model
- Emphasize openness and communication:
- Delegate responsibility to trusted community members
- If a patch is suitable for inclusion, it can be commited to the repository
and the author informed via devel-mailinglist
- If a patch needs modifications, the author will be told what problems there
were so he can fix it
- If a patch is unsuitable for inclusion under any conditions, the author
needs to know why
- If the patch author has not signed a contributor agreement he needs to be
pointed to it
- Emphasize code quality:
- Separate testing trees allow timely and safe merging of patches and new
features. Hopefully these will be managed by trusted community members.
- Let trusted community members preview the patches before they reach James
- Write common guidelines for all developers (e.g. usage of #ifdef's,
security practices, etc.)
- Organize testing of changed code (both automated and manual)
I probably forgot something, but I hope you get the general idea. These
development issues have been discussed earlier in this mailinglist:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=4B263634.3050000%40openvpn.net
I'll write down a loose agenda for the meeting and send it to the list. I hope
this way we can concentrate on finding solutions to the actual problems rather
than have a nice, heated discussion of the relative merits of Git, Mercurial
and Subversion :). I hope many of you can attend!
See you all,
--
Samuli Seppänen
Community Manager
OpenVPN Technologies, Inc
irc freenode net: mattock
twitter com: samuli_openvpn
