ZFS development strategy

[Martin Matuska]

Hi Pawel, Xin and all members of this list.

First of all, I would like to thank Pawel for all the work on porting
ZFS to FreeBSD and for creating this list.
I hope this list will help us to exchange new ideas, help each other
with existing issues or discuss how things should be implemented.

As the very first topic, I would like to discuss our ZFS development
strategy.

To coordinate our work as best as possible, it would be very nice to
have a common set of goals and targets or at least some basic strategy
guidelines we should follow. I understand everybody has some kind of
"own" agenda, but we should e.g. avoid reimplementing things 2 times
(and sometimes both in different ways).

At current state, we have quite well-tested post-v14 in head, stable/8,
post-v13 in stable/7, and latest work (post-v26) in pjd's perforce tree.

My main effort until now has been finding and importing bugfixes and/or
important improvements (e.g. parallel traversal, l2arc) from OpenSolaris
that do or may affect FreeBSD users into head and stable. If I continue
this effort I could easily land in v15 as a pre-step for v26 (v15
introduces group and user quotas and splits the python code as well).
What I also plan to do is creating a python dummy port for the python
code part.

So I would maily like to ask the following questions about ourt ZFS:
1. Are we interested in setting up some goals / guidelines for our ZFS
in FreeBSD to help coordinating our work?
2. Is there a (very rough) estimate when v26 might find its way into
wider testing and head?
3. If the answer for 2. lies in far future, does it make sense to go v15
as a step inbetween (including or not-including the python dummy port)?

Thank you very much,
mm