recurring "standup"

Eric S. Raymond esr at thyrsus.com
Mon Feb 1 23:29:31 UTC 2016


Mark Atwood <fallenpegasus at gmail.com>:
> Hello everyone (and hello from AU, I am in Geelong this week for #lca2016).
> 
> What have you all worked on in the past couple of weeks, what successes and
> frustrations have you had, and what do you see yourself working on over
> this next week?

Successes:

1. I've gotten back the ability to do Coverity scans and am keeping us
clean on that front.  This is a bit more of a statement than it might
otherwise be because Coverity upgunned its auditing capability recently;
it's checking more invariants and throwing more warnings than it used to.

2. I'm also on top of our issue queue. Our incidence of known bugs not
inherited from Classic is nil.  The dog that isn't barking is more
bug reports - we're getting peripheral little stuff about port issues
and documentation but no functional bugs. I like that kind of boredom.

3. Following the recent polishing pass by Sanjeev, I'm pretty happy
with the state of our documentation.  It has now been eyeball-checked
against the code's behavioral reality by *three* different people; the
quality and freshness is way ahead of Classic's.

4. We appear to be shipping solid code.  Our small but active pool of
test users absorbed 0.9.1 without a ripple.  I think there are grounds
for believing that our next several point releases will be uneventful
to the point of being boring.  Lovely, lovely boredom...

Ongoing work:

1. I'm still slogging away at capture/replay. It's hard work with enough
reverses that I'm now doing it on a private branch.  I have concluded that
the previous strategy of intercepting only the protocol-machine calls
won't work - doing that there's no way to keep a huge amount of peer state
up to date.  So now I'm trying to mock at the packet-I/O level, in effect
fully capturing and resimulating ntpd's network environment.

2. In the near future (later this week and early next) I mean to
budget some time to cross-port some of the recent (non-security) bug
fixes from Classic; I'm leaving the security stuff to Daniel.  I don't
believe any of these are actually very important, but it's good PR to
plug everything Classic has plugged.

Blockers:

I'm not currently blocked on any resources, nor on actions by others.
Hal Murray has not yet responded to my suggestion that we divvy up the
fix cross-ports from Classic, but I can start on those before he does.

Recommendations:

Our next natural breakpoint for a 0.9.2 release will be when either (1)
Amar finishes the unit tests, or (2) Hal and I finish cross-porting the
classic fixes.

General note:

I've been quiet lately because I've let myself slow down to normal
hours and more variety of work from the intense tempo and
near-monomaniacal concentration I was maintaining for most of last
year. That was effort well spent - it bought us the relatively smooth
sailing we're having now - but not really sustainable.

I'm taking it easier now so I can speed up when we need me to.  I expect
that'll be in the immediate run-up to 1.0.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>


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