The TODO list and planning a release schedule

[Chad Walstrom]

I figured I'd throw this out for discussion to see what people feel are
priorities for the GNATS software and what type of release schedule we
should try to hold to.  The following list is the text output of the XML
.todo file that has been checked into CVS.

I'm fishing for comments here, so please let us know what your
impressions are.  I've copied in almost all of the old TODO list into
the 'Unassigned' list item.  These are trivial to reparent to different
releases.  If a task isn't "assigned" to someone, it's because this is
still a work in progress or because no one has mentioned interest in it.

Also, our GNATS database, although recovered from the old fencepost
backups, has not been reinstalled or reinstated.  Consider every release
a bugfix release, although notable ones may show up on this list.  I'm
awaiting a fencepost account, and we have requested that the GNATS
database be installed and restored to its former glory from the GNU
sysadmin's.  Adam or I will keep you all posted.

A '-' in front of a list item indicates it's finished.

As far as a timeline, I would like to start preparing a 4.1 pre-release
ASAP.  There have been some CVS updates since the original 4.0 release,
and it's a good time mark the codebase before branching off for the big
changes in 4.2 and 5.0.

    GNATS General TODO List
  1.Release 4.1: Code cleanups, bug fixes, documentation updates
    Added: Fri Jun 11 10:36:54 2004  Completed: incomplete
    Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

    - 1.Prepend $(DESTDIR) to Makefile.in installation targets (Chad)
        Added: Fri Jun 11 11:08:38 2004  Completed: completed on Fri Jun 11 
14:07:23 2004
        Duration: 2h 58m  elapsed  Priority: veryhigh

        (Committed this to CVS two days ago.)
      2.Add missing manpages -- one manpage for each application
        Added: Fri Jun 11 11:11:57 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

      3.Kill install-sid script and update documentation
        Added: Fri Jun 11 11:09:17 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      4.Update Documentation: Set developer's policy.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:45:45 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

  2.Release 4.2: New Features
    Added: Fri Jun 11 10:37:02 2004  Completed: incomplete
    Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      1.Mail handling enhancements
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:48:24 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          1.Mail-based manipulation of GNATS database (Mel)
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:49:11 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          2.Trigger-based mail format replies (Mel)
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:49:28 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          3.Enable To: address@hidden syntax to queue-pr
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:49:40 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      2.MIME Handling
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:50:49 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          1.Detach files appropriately for GNATS DB format
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:51:48 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

          2.Convert HTML to TXT?
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:51:15 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

  3.Release 5.0: New Features, Major Changes to DB Layer, RDBMS
    Added: Fri Jun 11 10:37:07 2004  Completed: incomplete
    Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      1.Database Enhancements
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:53:57 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

          1.DB Abstraction Layer (Mel)
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:52:27 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

          2.Oracle RDBMS Backend
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:52:39 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

      2.Mail handling enhancements
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:55:10 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          1.Maintain mbox archive of all emails
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:55:27 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          2.Fake Audit trail entries as emails and append to mbox archive
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:55:41 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          3.Continue to use existing PR datafile for logging events, keywords, 
and metadata
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:55:58 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      3.Account enhancements
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:56:29 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

          1.PAM Authentication (Pankaj)
            Added: Fri Jun 11 14:56:45 2004  Completed: incomplete
            Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

            (Pankaj expressed interest in this on 2004-06-14)
  4.Unassigned
    Added: Fri Jun 11 13:50:51 2004  Completed: incomplete
    Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      1.Add squirrels, to make pst happy.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:42:32 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: high

      2.Add conditional formats
        Added: Fri Jun 11 13:56:21 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      3.Add script hooks, probably for edit formats and such.  Need to think 
about how to
        integrate in changes to the PR done by the script
        Added: Fri Jun 11 13:57:38 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

        (after all, that's really the whole point)
      4.Allow fields to not exist; add a "field-always-present" option to the 
field description
        Added: Fri Jun 11 13:58:17 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      5.Add virtual fields.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 13:59:28 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

        (The output format can use the existing format mechanism. This would 
necessitate having a
        "no-display" field flag, so that some fields don't show up in a "full" 
query (adding all
        the fields to full" is a rather obnoxious requirement).  There should 
also be a "raw"
        query that dumps all the real fields as raw contents, for editing 
purposes (and perhaps
        for other things).)
      6.Revise access control mechanisms.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:39:12 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      7.Should PRs have a ">Database-Name:" header?  Probably, and probably 
immutable.  Can be
        used when editing a PR, or submitting an initial one.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:39:27 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      8.Append-only fields.  Need to revise access control first.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:40:05 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

      9.Document functions.  Many of them are undocumented (even newly-added 
ones, shame).
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:41:10 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

     10.See how much farther we can go with removing knowledge of particular 
fields from the
        gnats code.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:42:03 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

     11.Make it possible to include adm field contents in the configuration 
file, instead of
        always using an external config file.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:42:59 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

     12.The database state is not clean.  There should be a struct that 
describes the current
        database, and is passed around as needed.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:43:22 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

     13.The client state is not clean.  The API is horrid; clients should not 
know or care if
        they're communicating via the network or locally.  The original 
solution was to just
        allow network access, but that's not really fixing the problem.  (We'll 
know we're there
        when gnatsd can act as a relay.)
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:43:55 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

     14.The client connection to the server should also be encapsulated in a 
struct as well. That
        is, something to describe the client (its hostname, username, password, 
access level). 
        Could eventually allow for a single server process that handles 
multiple connections.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:44:32 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: medium

     15.Change edit-pr to include the "Changed-Why:" header in the initial PR 
template instead of
        a separate prompt.  Maybe.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:24:46 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: low

     16.Should all the fields listed in the input section be required? 
Configurable? How about
        rejecting initial erroneous PRs (PRs with bad fields) instead of fixing 
them up? It sucks
        that pr-edit --submit < /dev/null could quite presumably create a valid 
PR.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:25:50 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: low

     17.The initial PR filing stuff is way too complicated.  In particular, the 
various field
        checks should be configured in dbconfig.  That would let us remove more 
builtin fields.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:38:18 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: low

     18.Decide if the "exec gnatsd locally" option is a security hole.  
(Probably.) Make it #if
        TESTING only?
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:38:30 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: low

     19.Come up with a better name for the lexer source file.
        Added: Fri Jun 11 14:41:35 2004  Completed: incomplete
        Duration: incomplete  Priority: low



-- 
Chad Walstrom <address@hidden>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */

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