Hi Folks,
This e-mail that touches on a number of subjects related to Offspring
and Offspring development. The motivation behind writing this e-mail is
to start a transformation of Offspring from a project that has
haphazardly and organically matured to a project with more explicit
leadership and direction. Initially a much larger e-mail, I've split
content out from this e-mail into two separate e-mails I'll be sending
following this one to avoid diluting the message and subsequent discussion.
The history of the Offspring project includes some notable milestones.
The project that exists today looks very different from the handful of
scripts first committed to the original bazaar branch on October 17th
2007. At first, configuration of builds were just different code
pathways but moved out into distinct configuration files in September
2008. In November 2008, we added initial support to configure a
different set of builds to run nightly based on the host and the first
'web interface' which was nothing fancier than static html pages
generated by the build process. In early March 2009, things start to
look more familiar with the development of the 'master' and 'slave' to
support an elastic build farm and to provide more efficient build
queueing and build farm utilization. Later the same month, the
django-powered web interface debuted to allow engineers to easily build
their projects on demand. April 2009 saw a major refactoring of the code
to add support for multiple image build tools via an abstraction layer.
In 2010 we began to have serious interest and even contributors to the
project from other groups within Canonical. This ultimately culminated
in Offspring being officially released as an Open Source project on
November 30th 2010 with assistance from Linaro.
The project has seen a lull of activity over the past year but Offspring
continues to be mission critical infrastructure for us and continues to
be developed. The driving force thus far has been entirely an organic
one - to scratch an itch- that has been juggled between other business
objectives and tasks. With recent changes to our team however,
development of Offspring has become a greater focus and we've never been
in a better position to lead further innovation, engage
stakeholders/contributors, and foster a community of users. As we begin
2012, we'll be giving needed attention to the development and
contribution process. Although the code was open sourced over a year ago
we actually haven't invested much in being an 'open source project'.
Three initiatives to ramp-up Offspring development:
1. The first initiative to fix that is this mailing list which will now
serve as one of the primary conduits of communication on Offspring
development; e.g. announcements, developer questions, architectural
discussions, review of feature and enhancement proposals, etc.
2. The second initiative is more open, pro-active, and responsive
communication about roadmaps, architecture and design decisions, code
reviews, development processes, etc. starting with this and subsequent
e-mails.
3. And lastly, the third initiative is a more agile / scrum development
process with two week iterations for the PES infrastructure team.
Although an internal change it is important to note none the less to
help set appropriate expectations. For example, we'll be looking to
deploy trunk to our instance at the end of each iteration and thus this
will have an impact on the stewardship of trunk (which I'll discuss
further in a separate e-mail).
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please don't hesitate
to get in touch with me.
Cheers,
--
Cody A.W. Somerville
Release Engineer
Commercial Engineering
Canonical Canada Ltd.
Phone: +1 781 850 2087
Cell: +1 613 401 5141
Fax: +1 613 687 7368
Email:cody.somervi...@canonical.com
--
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