[Pachy-Dev] Report from weekly call 2/2/06

[Joshua Archer]

Hello Pachyderm Development Team!

Yesterday, Thursday Feb 2nd, we had another of our weekly calls, and  
at this call we covered an overview of the project's status, but more  
importantly I proposed a shift in the way that we operate the  
development arm of the pachyderm project, to prepare us for the  
imminent release of the project to the open source community. I'd  
like to take a moment to cover both with the greater group, and get  
feedback. I apologize in advance for the length of this email.

First, I welcomed Susan Baur and Adam Tanguma to our team as system  
administration support for the NMC live instances (production, dev,  
etc.). Adam Tanguma comes to us from the NMC, and will be acting as  
first-tier support for Pachyderm issues, as well as manning the help  
desk for NMC instance Pachyderm users. Susan Baur is from the CDL,  
and will be acting as second-tier support for the NMC Pachyderm  
servers. Susan, Adam and I met after the dev call, and discussed  
operating procedures. We will be opening up a mail alias  
'help at pachyderm.org', which all support mail will get funneled  
through, and which will forward to Adam, Susan and myself. Until  
then, direct your support questions to Adam, and he will help you and/ 
or push them down the stack when appropriate. Thank you both for  
contributing your time and effort to the team, the development team  
looks forward to working with you.

On the Pachyderm project, we've gotten a lot done over the last week,  
and yet we still have much to accomplish. One thing that I have  
finished this past week is the OS-independent thumbnail image  
generator, meaning we're no longer tied to Mac OS X for a fully- 
operational Pachyderm. There were also some bugs in some of the  
Apollo libraries that I managed to fix as well. There are still a few  
nits to fix in the thumbnail code, but for the most part, we are there!

We've gotten a lot accomplished on the server front as well this  
week. The subversion repositories have been moved from apollo to  
dev.pachyderm.org, and earlier yesterday I sent out instructions on  
how to switch repositories from apollo to dev. If you need help,  
please contact me and I will walk you through the process. Very soon  
I intend on cleaning up the repository in a significant way, so get  
your code checked in soon. I'll notify you when you will need to do a  
fresh check-out of the repository. I still need to move over a copy  
of the compiled apollo libraries to dev as well, to use as our  
ratified versions of the libraries for pachyderm. I'll let everyone  
know when that happens as well.

Mantis has been moved to dev as well, though until yesterday any mail  
Mantis was trying to send was being sent with a 'localhost.local'  
hostname, so many institutional spam filters might have been blocking  
the mail (such as the CSU/CDL). That has been fixed, and mail should  
be coming out normally. So, please check your Mantis queue manually  
and get yourself up-to-date, just in case someone's assigned a bug to  
you or has updated bug status.

We need to design and implement a back-up scheme for dev -- Susan and  
I will work on a plan for this, and will run our ideas past the group  
(and discuss with Larry if $$ is necessary).

I am also currently working to get the most recent version of the  
code base updated on dev. I'm still running into configuration  
issues, but I'm close. Once that is done, we should look to dev as  
our test machine instead of apollo. In fact, at this point we do not  
have any dependencies on apollo, and all activities should take place  
on dev.

The production server (www.pachyderm.org) appears to be running just  
fine, which is excellent news. We will eventually need to upgrade the  
version of pachyderm to the most recent on www once we are convinced  
it is stable and dependable. We also need to design and implement a  
back-up plan for www. Same comments as above.

The CDL is also working to get our own instance running on Mac OS X  
(pachyderm.cdl.edu), and progress is moving forward on that in  
parallel with installation on dev.pachyderm.org. Other servers to  
take note of are the NMC Windows Pachyderm instance (no domain yet,  
but a request has been made for 'win.pachyderm.org') which is up and  
running, with only a few nits to work out before it's complete, as  
well as a Linux version that Tim Steiner has installed on his own  
personal server as a proof-in-concept (seems to work well!), and the  
Solaris version that Case and Sun are working jointly to install.  
Very soon, we will be able to boast running instances on 4 platforms  
(Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris)!!

SFMOMA is scheduled to attempt an install of Pachyderm the week of  
2/27, so I and Tim Steiner will be working with Tim Svenonius and the  
SFMOMA IT staff to get that running in the very near future. In this  
installation, we will be testing Tim Steiner's installation scripts  
for Windows. I am also looking for any other volunteers willing to  
attempt an installation at their own institution on a casual  (non- 
public) basis to help us debug and perfect the installation process.

I also mentioned in the call several proposals that have been  
submitted to multiple conferences for Pachyderm, in case anyone would  
like to co-present, or be present if the proposals are accepted. I  
have submitted several proposals to NMC (including one with Jeff  
Merriman regarding Sakai/Pachyderm integration), Michelle LaMar and I  
have submitted a proposal to Educause, and I have submitted a  
proposal to the CSU's CATS conference. I also intend on submitting a  
proposal to OSCON. If you are attending any of these conference, I  
can give you more details on the proposals. Also, if anyone else has  
submitted proposals to conferences for Pachyderm, please mention it  
to the pachy-dev list.

One final bit of status is that we are in need of hammering out a  
feature list for our next release, and attaching a time schedule for  
that release (and any milestones leading up to that release). I'm  
certain that will be a process that will occupy the pachy-dev list  
for a little while in the very near future.

My intention is to review Mantis, and to accumulate any information  
the team has and update the status report document which I sent out  
several weeks ago, either today or monday. Please, if you have any  
changes or additions to the document to make, let me know what they  
are as soon as you can.

-----------------------------

Alright, are you all still with me? Still awake? Okay -- on to the  
second section of the meeting... everyone, take a deep breath,  
stretch, refill your coffee, and come back to read the rest :). I'll  
put it in a separate email, since it's taking me so long to write it  
up. I'll send it out in a few hours...