svn commit: r48022 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status
Benjamin Kaduk
bjk at FreeBSD.org
Fri Jan 15 05:09:28 UTC 2016
Author: bjk
Date: Fri Jan 15 05:09:27 2016
New Revision: 48022
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/48022
Log:
Add core entry from matthew
Modified:
head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml
Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml
==============================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml Fri Jan 15 04:18:08 2016 (r48021)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml Fri Jan 15 05:09:27 2016 (r48022)
@@ -2471,4 +2471,164 @@
</task>
</help>
</project>
+
+ <project cat='team'>
+ <title>The &os; Core Team</title>
+
+ <contact>
+ <person>
+ <name>&os; Core Team</name>
+ <email>core at FreeBSD.org</email>
+ </person>
+ </contact>
+
+ <body>
+ <p>Two major concerns have occupied much of core's attention
+ during the last quarter: the reorganisation of the Security
+ Team and the question of whether to import GPLv3 licensed code
+ into the source repository.</p>
+
+ <p>The Security Team reorganisation, first proposed to Core
+ during a meeting at BSDCan this year by Gleb Smirnoff — core
+ member and newly-appointed deputy Security Officer — has now
+ been accomplished. In order to improve the project's
+ responsiveness to security alerts, to maintain security on
+ privileged information received in confidence before general
+ publication and, not least, to reduce the work load on the
+ security officer, the role of the SO team has been redefined as
+ the controller of the distribution of security sensitive
+ information within the project; they are responsible for
+ interfacing with external bodies and individuals reporting
+ security problems, and connecting them with appropriate
+ individuals within the project with the technical expertise to
+ address the identified concerns. The SO team was cut down to just
+ the Security Officer and his deputy, assisted by a secretary, and
+ with input and help in drafting security advisories from former
+ and any potential future Security Officers plus liasons with Core,
+ Cluster Administration and Release Engineering.</p>
+
+ <p>Core would particularly like to thank the former members of
+ the Security Team group for their past contributions, now that
+ the Security Team role has been merged into the Security
+ Officer's responsibilities.</p>
+
+ <p>The other large question concerning Core is how to provide a
+ modern toolchain for all supported achitectures. Tier 1
+ architectures are required to ship with a toolchain
+ unencumbered by onerous license terms. This is currently
+ provided for i386 and arm64 by the LLVM suite, including the
+ Clang compiler, LLD and LLDB. However LLVM support for other
+ (Tier 2 or below) architectures is not yet of sufficient quality
+ to be viable, and the older but pre-existing GPLv2 toolchain
+ cannot support some of the interesting new architectures such
+ as arm64 and RISC V. Pragmatically, in order for the project
+ to support these, until LLVM support arrives we must turn to the
+ GNU project's GPLv3 licenced toolchain.</p>
+
+ <p>The argument here is whether to import GPLv3 licensed code
+ into the &os; src repository with all of the obligations on
+ patent terms and source code redistribution that would entail,
+ not only for the &os; project itself but for numerous
+ downstream consumers of &os; code. Not having a toolchain
+ readily available is a big impediment to working on a new
+ architecture.</p>
+
+ <p>One potential solution is to create a range of "GPLv3
+ toolchain" base-system packages out of a completely separate
+ source code repository, for instance within the &os; area on
+ Github. These would be distributed equivalently to the other
+ base system binary packages when that mechanism is
+ introduced.</p>
+
+ <p>Core recognises that this is a decision with wide-ranging
+ consequences and will be producing a position paper for
+ circulation amongst all interested parties in order to judge
+ community opinion on the matter. Core welcomes feedback from
+ all interested parties on the subject.</p>
+
+ <p>Beyond these two big questions, Core has handled a number of
+ lesser items:</p>
+
+ <ul>
+ <li>Core approved the formation of a wiki-admin team to take
+ over managing the Wiki, to curate the Wiki content and work
+ on navigation and organization of existing technical content
+ and to evaluate new Wiki software with the aim of opening up
+ the Wiki to contributions from the public.</li>
+
+ <li>An external review board has been assembled to look at
+ the Code of Conduct, including a mixture of project members
+ and experts from external groups. The review process is
+ getting under way and Core is awaiting their report.</li>
+
+ <li>The standard documentation license was found to be
+ unfit for its purpose, and the doceng group had temporarily
+ reverted to the previous license while a new replacement was
+ drafted. This new license is now the default for new
+ documentation submissions. However, one factor emerging from
+ this review was the difficulty of maintaining correct
+ authorial attributions for sections of documentation, some of
+ which may only be a few words long. Unlike source code,
+ blocks of documentation are frequently moved around within
+ individual files, or even between files. Consequently Core
+ would like to introduce a "Voluntary Contribution
+ Agreement" along the lines of the one operated
+ by the Apache Foundation. With this, copyrights are signed
+ over to the &os; Foundation, with individual contributions
+ being recognised by recording names in a general
+ "Authors" file. This will be another alternative
+ alongside the existing copyright mechanisms used in the
+ project. Core is interested to hear any opinions on the
+ subject.</li>
+
+ <li>Core approved the formation of a new
+ "dev-announce" mailing list, which all &os; committers
+ should be members of. This will be a low-traffic moderated list
+ to contain important announcements, heads-ups, warnings of code
+ freezes, changes in policy and notifications of events that
+ affect the project as a whole.</li>
+
+ <li>Around eight years ago, an attempt was made to import the
+ OpenBSD sensors framework. This was rejected at the time as
+ potentially blocking the development of a better designed
+ framework. However, no such development has occurred in the
+ intervening time whilst the sensors framework has been in
+ use successfully by both OpenBSD and FreeNAS. Despite some
+ concerns about the efficiency of the framework and potential
+ impacts on power consumption and hence battery lifetime, core
+ is minded to approve the import, but wants to consult with
+ interested developers first.</li>
+
+ <li>Core is exploring the legal ramifications for the project
+ of the "Right to Be Forgotten" established by
+ the European Court of Justice.</li>
+
+ <li>Core is also seeking an alternative means for holding
+ their regular monthly conference calls. The current,
+ paid-for, service has less than satisfactory sound quality
+ and reliability, and Core would like to switch to a free
+ video conferencing solution.</li>
+ </ul>
+
+ <p>This quarter also saw a particularly large influx of new
+ commit bit requests, with on occasion, four votes running
+ simultaneously. Please welcome Kurt Lidl, Svatopluk Kraus,
+ Michal Meloun, Jonathan Looney (Juniper), Daisuke Aoyama, Phil
+ Shafer (Juniper), Ravi Pokala (Panasas), Anish Gupta and Mark
+ Bloch (Mellanox) to the ranks of src committers. In addition,
+ core was delighted to restore commit privileges for Eric
+ Melville after a hiatus of many years.</p>
+
+ <p>No commit bits were taken in during the quarter. A
+ non-committer account was approved for Kevin Bowling of
+ LimeLight Networks. Kevin will be doing systems administration
+ work with clusteradm with particular interest in the parts of
+ the cluster that are now hosted in LLNW's facilities. Deb
+ Goodkin of the &os; Foundation was added to the developers
+ mailing list: she was one of the few members of the Foundation
+ Board not already on the list, and having awareness of what is
+ going on in the developer community will help her to support
+ the project more effectively.</p>
+ </body>
+ </project>
</report>
More information about the svn-doc-all
mailing list