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Re: PCP developers meeting minutes - 21st March

To: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: PCP developers meeting minutes - 21st March
From: fche@xxxxxxxxxx (Frank Ch. Eigler)
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:03:20 -0400
Cc: PCP Mailing List <pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Delivered-to: pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <69022709.338111.1395040617166.JavaMail.zimbra@xxxxxxxxxx> (Nathan Scott's message of "Mon, 17 Mar 2014 03:16:57 -0400 (EDT)")
References: <181660187.318596.1395039778979.JavaMail.zimbra@xxxxxxxxxx> <69022709.338111.1395040617166.JavaMail.zimbra@xxxxxxxxxx>
User-agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux)
nathans wrote:

> [...]
> - release schedule
>   - once-a-month useful?  sustainable?
>     o  [nathans] seems to be working well, good balance between the
>        frequency of release, amount of code change, and time spent
>        doing releases & QA.
> [...]
>     o  nathans mentions next release will slip half a week to give a
>        bit more time for his own dev work, more reviews/merges, more QA
> [...]
>   - code reviews
>     o  nathans seeking more people to be doing code reviews, this is a
>        big time sink and would like to see this task (which is at times
>        very time consuming & not-fun-at-all) shared around more.

I believe we noted that these are interconnected issues.  With Nathan
being the sole dev-branch gatekeeper, he needs to keep reviewing code,
even if someone else has also reviewed it.  Spending a week per month
on release duties reduces the time available for reviewing, merging
others' stuff, and developing his own stuff.


> == Archive logging topics
> [...]
>   - would "it" require new context type?
>     o  yes, to solve both the live/archive transition and multiple log
>        aspects well [nathans]
>     o  general concerns expressed about overloading / shoe-horning
>        functionality into existing context types when we clearly will
>        need a new context type eventually [nathans]

Consensus was that we currently foresee no actual specific semantic
shoe-horning problem between the single- and virtually-concatenated
archives.  (That should not be surprising, since virtual concatenation
can be implemented "as if" by pmlogextract-merging all the inputs
first, then using single-archive mode on the result.)

>     o  fche suggests continual addition of code until nathans complains
>        during code review that its going too far is a Just Fine option.

A more scholarly retelling would be that the consensus was that we
should go ahead with such a prototype, while we and Nathan will keep
an eye out for unforseen semantic "shoe-horning".


> == Data integrity
>
>   - whither the fche/fsync patches?
>     o  revisited review comments - nathans wants a well-thought-out API
>        that tackles the meatier part of the problem (interaction between
>        sync and rename); not content with a static inline in impl.h nor
>        anything that unconditionally adds fsync's to client code paths

      o  fche pointed out that it should not be necessary to solve the
         entire suite of problems in order to make progress on some of them

>     o  perhaps move attention from library to tools that need to be very
>        careful, e.g. pmlogger_daily before culling inputs  [kenj]
>     o  pmlogrewrite -i seems particularly exposed [kenj to investigate]

      o  fche to rework the fsync patches on a tool-oriented way, adding
         the operation to pmlogger, and input-destructive processing tools      
         like pmlogrewrite -i and a (future) pmlogextract merge-and-delete
         mode.


> == Supported platforms
> [...]
>   - which unixes/distros are of interest?  release binaries for them?
>     o  reviewed each of the binary platforms from oss.sgi.com Downloads.

         namely: solaris (fork), linux (rh-flavoured + debian-unstable), mac osx

>   - how do we share build/testing load?
>   - how to gather evidence about compatibility assumptions
>   - how to entice distro reps into presence in pcp community?

    - noted that some other linux distros have pulled in pcp occasionally
    - noted that we don't know what sgi is doing with our pcp binaries or 
sources


- FChE

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