[Grml-devel] Minutes from the Grml developer meeting, October 2011

[Michael Prokop]

Hi,

during those days we had a small Grml developer meeting. Christian,
Jimmy and me met in Graz/Austria and got a bunch of stuff done. I'm
happy to provide the minutes from the Grml developer meeting in this
mail.

Report from the Grml developer meeting, October 2011
====================================================

What has been achieved
----------------------

 * wiki.grml.org has been migrated to our new server (+ dokuwiki was upgraded)
 * boot-info-script has been packaged and uploaded to Debian
   * currently sitting in NEW:
     http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/boot-info-script_0.60-1.html
 * major cleanups in grml-scripts, grml-scripts-core and grml-network
 * figured out technical details regarding usage of github (see below)
 * discussed project vision, team constitution, rebranding of
   grml-small/grml-medium, package removals and efforts towards
   providing our packages to Debian and welcoming new contributors

What needs to be done in the next days/weeks/months
---------------------------------------------------

 * github (ch + mika)
 * mailing list migration (jimmy)
 * improve infrastructure documentation (jimmy)
 * move daily build server (ch + mika)
 * fix the hostname from DHCP story in grml and
   grml-debootstrap (mika + ch)
 * live-initramfs patches (ch + mika + mru)
 * proper backup infrastructure for our server (admins?)
 * iso2usb (jimmy)
 * package cleanup/removal (everyone)
 * call for netscripts on mailing list in order to provide
   examples with grml (mika)
 * planning of bi-weekly online team meeting (mika)
 * further streamline release process (ch + mika)
   * upcoming stable release planned for 2011-12-06

The Grml Project Vision
-----------------------

Focus on two targets:

 * Ship an Install&Rescue system (targeted ISO + Netboot options)
 * Provide & Maintain texttools inside Debian (zsh package, various
   texttool configs we want people to use)

Everything else (for what no developer invests enough time) should
go: this includes accessibility support, old texttool
configs/wrappers, various X tools/WMs, compilers.

Grml Team Constitution
----------------------

We want to provide a transparent way how the Grml team works. To
reflect that we came up with a document which provides the
constitution for the Grml team:

 * https://github.com/grml/grml-constitution/blob/master/Constitution.md

Based on recent activity the team was restructured:

 * Developers: Alexander Wirt, Christian Hofstaedtler, Frank
   Terbeck, Gerfried Fuchs, Michael Prokop, Ulrich Dangel
 * Contributors: Jimmy Gredler, Michael Gebetsroither
 * New contributors considered for joining the team: Axel Beckert,
   Bernhard Tittelbach

Grml Developer Roles/Teams
--------------------------

We'd love to actually have commitments from our individual
developers on what they'll be doing. Please add yourself to
http://www.doodle.com/pke97c2k9xd5nrpa with which teams you'll want
to be associated with.

Deprecate i386 port
-------------------

i386 is an architecture which is annoying to maintain, since most
(all?) of us developers work on 64bit only systems nowadays and
building packages for i386 kind of duplicates our efforts WRT
packaging and kernel maintenance.

Since too many users still need 32bit kernels we'd like to remove
the i386 port of Grml in 2014 (or earlier if demand drops/it becomes
completely unmaintainable).

Removal of grml-small flavour
-----------------------------

The grml-small flavour is a hack and something most (all?) of us
developers never use ourselves. grml-medium is the much cleaner and
better working solution. If someone really needs a minimalistic ISO
other distributions exist (Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core Linux) which
do a better job at that than we do.

Instead we propose the rebranding of grml-medium into grml-light and
keep grml-full as it is. (And remove grml-small.) This slightly
reduces the amount of ISOs we have to build (also on a daily base),
removes all the hacks we're doing for grml-small, reduces space on
the mirrors, and to some extent users hopefully will be a little
less confused what the Grml variants are about.

Using Github
------------

We're officially using github (https://github.com/grml/) as a mirror
of the Grml git repositories (http://git.grml.org/) since 19th of
june 2011. Since we want to improve the workflow with Grml's
contributors (forking, pull-requests,...) we decided to further
evaluate the usage of Github as our primary Git server. git.grml.org
would be used for the private repositories and as a backup/mirror of
our github repositories. A mirroring script has been written and
available post-receive hooks have been evaluated.

Funny side note: exactly while we reviewed the issue tracking
workflow of Github we noticed that "Issues Dashboard for
Organizations" feature (see
https://github.com/organizations/grml/dashboard/issues), which
launched just a few minutes(!) before we looked at it (see
https://github.com/blog/959-issues-dashboard-for-organizations for
the official announcement). :)

Bug Tracking
------------

Since we're providing more and more packages officially to Debian
another bug tracking system is showing up on the Grml developer
front: http://bugs.debian.org/

To avoid further confusion that's our plan:

 * packages available in Debian should use bugs.debian.org
 * packages which have a git repository at github should be handled
   on github by default (unless already used inside Debian BTS,
   then the user chooses)
 * virtual package/repo "grml" for handling meta packages/non-packages
 * bts.grml.org might be deprecated in the long run if it works as expected

Package removals
----------------

As part of our ongoing efforts to get as many of our packages to
Debian and keep in our repositories just what doesn't fit in Debian
(yet), we did further cleanup reviews.

The following packages and repositories will be gone by 30th of
October 2011 unless we receive qualified objections:

 * aesutil
 * bfa
 * bkp
 * deletemail
 * dupseek
 * evms
 * ex
 * ext3rminator
 * ftpbackup
 * gateguardian
 * gifshuffle
 * grml-vpn
 * grml
 * grml64
 * grml-small
 * grml-btnet
 * grml-docs
 * grml-firefox (replaced)
 * grml-files (replaced)
 * grml-lsb
 * grml-mercurial-utils
 * grml-roadmap
 * grml-runit
 * grml-scanpartitions
 * grml-templates
 * grml-terminalserver-data
 * grml2hd-util: merged with grml-insomnia (see below)
 * icmp-mtu
 * icmp-quench
 * icmp-reset
 * lcdtest
 * rootsh
 * nat-traverse
 * ncp
 * prosilla
 * shadowfs
 * shish
 * smap
 * tal
 * thc-ipv6
 * thinkfinger-tools
 * upgrade-oldest

The following packages and repositories need love:

 * grml-debugtools: needs love
 * grml-desktop: needs configfile discussion
 * grml-etc: remove various old configs/skel
 * grml-etc-core: needs love
 * grml-git-doc: replace with contributing doc TBD
 * grml-git-tools: needs love, possibly move contents to Debian
 * grml-homepage: reevaluate for homepage ideas
 * grml-infrastructure: split source-report away
 * grml-policy: move to new homepage
 * grml-saveconfig: remove, provide upgrade path
 * grml-shlib: check who uses this
 * heirloom-sh: if anyone still wants to see it available
   provide it officially within Debian, otherwise we're going
   to remove it from our repos
   * any takers for Debian?
 * ptfinder: considered for inclusion in Debian Forensic

New packages considered:

 * grml-insomnia: grml2hd will be renamed to grml-insomnia and moved
   out of PATH so people don't use grml2hd for something else than
   demonstration purposes

 * grml-zshrc: migrate zsh stuff from grml-etc-core and include
   grml-gen-zshrefcard in it to have a better name for advertising
   our Zsh configuration

Thanks for listening,

regards,
-mika- - for the Grml project
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://ml.grml.org/pipermail/grml-devel/attachments/20111014/c26dfd94/attachment.pgp>