From: bjk@FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 1st Quarter 2017
While a few of these projects indicate they are a "plan B" or an
"attempt III", many are still hewing to their original plans, and all
have produced impressive results. Please enjoy this vibrant collection
of reports, covering the first quarter of 2017.
--Benjamin Kaduk
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The deadline for submissions covering the period from April to June
2017 is July 7, 2017.
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FreeBSD Team Reports
* The FreeBSD Core Team
* The FreeBSD Foundation
* The FreeBSD Ports Collection
* The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Projects
* Ceph on FreeBSD
* OpenBSM
* Porting Software to CloudABI: Sandboxed Bitcoin!
* Support for eMMC Flash and Faster SD Card Modes
* TrustedBSD
Kernel
* FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure
* Intel 10G and 40G Network Driver Updates
* Linuxulator
* MMC Stack Using the CAM Framework
* pNFS Server Plan B
Architectures
* 64-bit PowerPC Book-E Support
* FreeBSD on Marvell Armada38x
* FreeBSD/s390x Attempt III
Ports
* MySQL
* Rust
Documentation
* The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
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FreeBSD Team Reports
The FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team
Core's primary function is to ensure the long-term viability of the
FreeBSD project. A very large part of that is to ensure that the
interactions between developers remain cordial, and consequently that
the project appears welcoming to newcomers.
Normally, most of Core's activities around this are done in private --
a quiet word in the right ear, some discrete peacemaking, occasional
reading of the riot act. Most of the time, this is all that is
necessary.
Unfortunately, this quarter we had an instance where such private
measures failed to achieve the desired result, and we ended up ejecting
a developer. This developer is an extremely talented programmer and has
made significant contributions to the Ports Collection. Despite this,
portmgr found him to be sufficiently disruptive and abrasive that in
their judgement, the project was better off overall to sever his
connection to itself, and core backed them up in that. We are sorry
that events came to this sad conclusion, but we remain convinced that
this was a necessary step to safeguard the character of our community.
In a more positive light, Core has been working on a proposal to
recognise notable contributors to the FreeBSD project who are not (or
perhaps not yet) suitable to be put forward as new committers. In
addition to the usual routes of recognising people that write numbers
of good bug reports or that supply patches or that volunteer to
maintain ports, this will also allow recognition of people who
contribute by such things as organising FreeBSD events or who promote
FreeBSD through social media. A formal announcement of Core's proposal
is imminent.
During January, the core secretary held an exercise to contact all
source committers who had been inactive for more than 18 months and
persuade them to hand in their commit bits if they were not planning to
resume working on FreeBSD in the near future. This is meant to be a
routine function -- the "grim reaper" -- that aims to keep the list of
people with the ability to commit pretty much in synchrony with the
list of people that are actively committing. The regular process had
fallen out of activity several years ago, and we needed to clear the
decks before restarting. Ultimately, this resulted in some 20
developers-emeritus handing in their commit bits.
No new commit bits were awarded during this quarter.
Core is also taking soundings on producing a 10.4-RELEASE. This is not
in the current plan, but a number of developers and important FreeBSD
users would be keen to see it happen, given some of the work that has
gone into the stable/10 branch since 10.3-RELEASE. On the other hand,
this would represent an additional support burden for the Security
Team, including maintaining versions of software that have been
declared obsolete upstream, in particular OpenSSL. As an even-numbered
release, 10.4-RELEASE would have a "normal" rather than an "extended"
lifetime which means it should not result in extending the support
lifetime of the stable/10 branch.
In other news, Core arranged for the old and largely inactive
marketing@FreeBSD.org mailing list to be wound up, and for any
remaining activities to be transferred to the FreeBSD Foundation.
Core also asked clusteradm to turn off Internet-wide access to the
finger server on freefall.freebsd.org. Many developers have included
details such as phone numbers into the GECOS field of their FreeBSD
password database entries, and these would be revealed by the finger
server -- details which are nowadays generally felt inadvisable to
expose publicly. finger is still available internally within
freefall.freebsd.org. Core recommends that GECOS data is limited to
just your full name, and we have updated the standard "new committer"
e-mail template to reflect that.
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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