[openib-general] Towards a 1.0 release of OpenIB

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Here's a strawman proposal for a 1.0 release process.  Please let me
know what you think.

I have a set of absolutely minimal goals for the 1.0 release, and I
would like to open up a short period of wider discussion about those
goals.

Expectation management:
      * The process is open and transparent.  Discussion happens on
        openib-general.  Bugs go into Bugzilla.  Documentation lives in
        the wiki.  Changes are made in Subversion.  There should be no
        way someone can step up after the fact and say "but I wasn't
        informed of the plan!"
      * The target user population is reasonably savvy early adopters.
      * For everything that we commit to shipping, we must be able to
        tell users what has been tested, how heavily, and on what
        hardware.

Testing:
      * We need to know what tests people can run, and in what
        environments.
      * We would like everyone to be able to run the same tests, so
        someone must gather test suites and execution instructions
        together.

Methods of delivery:
      * A branch of the Subversion repository.
      * A set of source tarballs.
      * A collection of binary packages.  We need to identify distros
        that people are interested in, and distros that people have time
        and resources to build for.

Milestone timeline:
      * Feb 24 - create 1.0 release branch in Subversion repository
      * Feb 28 - close of "what I want in the 1.0 release" discussion
      * Feb 28 - Bugzilla configured properly
      * Mar 03 - wiki contains actual data about test suites, who's
        running what, status, etc.
      * Mar 06 - rc1 snapshot and source tarballs available
      * Mar 27 - rc2
      * Apr 17 - rc3
      * May 08 - 1.0

Within the next week, I'd like to gain an understanding of the following
things:

      * Which features users want to see tested
      * Who can sign up to test and maintain those features, and how
      * Which distros users want binary packages for
      * Who can sign up to build and test those packages
      * Whether we need to be building binary kernel packages to make
        testing more consistent
      * Which patches or features need to be pushed to the upstream
        kernel (I'd prefer an unpatched kernel.org 2.6.17 to just work
        with the 1.0 userspace, for example)