[Project-managers] BSP 2009 and changes to project management procedures

[Ted Ralphs]

Hi folks,

This e-mail is to (1) announce the 2009 Bug Squashing
Party<https://projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC/wiki/BugSquashingParty09>and
(2) make you aware of important impending changes in the TLC's
recommended project management procedures. I apologize for the lengthy
explanation, but there is a lot to tell!

1. The third annual Bug Squashing
Party<https://projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC/wiki/BugSquashingParty09>is
scheduled to take place July 7-8. For those who are not familiar with
this event, it is an annual on-line event in which volunteers gather in a
virtual chat room to fix as many small bugs, compiler warnings, portability
issues, memory leaks, etc. as possible in COIN projects. By gathering
volunteers with access to a wide range of platforms and compilers, we have
been able in the past to accomplish a lot in a short period of time. The
procedure involves creating a temporary copy of the most recent stable
branch of various projects, fixing the bugs in that copy and then merging
the changes (at the PMs discretion) back into the stable branch and/or
trunk, as appropriate. More information is available at the Bug Squashing
Party <https://projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC/wiki/BugSquashingParty09> wiki.

PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU

-- WANT TO HELP WITH THE EVENT YOURSELF
-- DO OR DO *NOT* WANT BUGS TO BE FIXED IN YOUR PROJECT

By default, all projects using the BuildTools will be included.

2. As part of a multi-faceted, long-term effort to improve the usability of
all COIN projects and ease the overall maintenance burden, we will be
announcing over the next several months a number of changes to the
recommended project management procedures for COIN projects. The first of
these will be a recommendation to begin developing project trunks against
release versions of other projects. There are many reasons for this and we
will be providing a full explanation in the near future. In short, however,
we would like to decouple development of independent COIN projects as much
as possible in order to (1) reduce the impact of individual projects'
release cycles on other projects, (2) ease the complexity of dependencies
and make simultaneously installation of multiple projects easier on end
users and (3) ultimately make it possible to support the development of a
package management system that would enable easy installation and upgrade of
COIN binary packages over time. At the moment, our procedures tend to couple
the development of many of the projects and actually make the release cycle
much slower. Our current handling of dependencies is also not very
compatible with the maintenance RPMs for COIN, etc. You will here more about
this over time.

PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU

-- WOULD LIKE US TO SWITCH THE EXTERNALS OF YOUR PROJECT'S TRUNK TO POINT TO
RELEASES OF DEPENDENT PROJECTS AND TEST IT DURING THE BSP.
-- PLAN ON DOING THIS YOURSELF.

Of course, this is a completely voluntary step, but we are strongly
encouraging it. Please let me know if you have any questions about any of
this. Thanks for your support!

Cheers,

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted
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