An Update to the OpenAFS Community compiled by the Advisory Council
The OpenAFS Newsletter is intended to be a regular communiqué from the OpenAFS Elders to the community of OpenAFS administrators and end users. In these newsletters the Elders will summarize the activities of the OpenAFS community, the progress that has been achieved in OpenAFS development, and outline the road map of future development that could be accomplished with the availability of sufficient resources. It is hoped that these newsletters will strengthen the community and foster additional dialogues and participation.
The OpenAFS Advisory Council met on November 13. The following topics were discussed in the meeting: Development, AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop, Documentation, and OpenAFS communications. Minutes of the meeting can be found at: http://www.openafs.org/pages/elders/minutes-20071113.html.
Warren Yenson has resigned from the OpenAFS Council of Elders because he is no longer actively involved in OpenAFS development or with OpenAFS customers. Warren had been closely involved with OpenAFS in his position at Morgan Stanley, but he has not been involved with AFS in his position at Google. The Council of Elders would like to thank Warren for his contributions to OpenAFS and wish him well in the future.
Below is a summary of recent OpenAFS development activity.
UNIX/Linux Servers
UNIX/Linux Clients
Windows Clients
There have been three OpenAFS for Windows releases since the last Elders meeting: OpenAFS 1.5.25 (9/20/07), 1.5.26 (10/23/07), 1.5.27 (11/7/07).
The following work is changes have been made post 1.5.27::
Future work plans for OpenAFS Windows Development include:
Work is slowly proceeding on improving the OpenAFS documentation and manuals, but there's a lot of work to do, and we can always use more volunteers.
The OpenAFS Admin Reference Manual has been converted to manual pages (written in POD), and significant work has been done to update them and write additional entries for new commands. The current manual pages can be found in OpenAFS CVS in the doc/man-pages directory and have been shipped with all recent OpenAFS releases. doc/man-pages/README contains a list of work that still needs to be done, and all of the manual pages would benefit from further review and editing. Additionally, we need a volunteer to work on automating the process of converting these manual pages to HTML and hooking that into the process for generating the OpenAFS web site.
The other OpenAFS manuals have been converted to DocBook, but now need cleanup, updates for all the changes since OpenAFS 1.0, removal of obsolete information, and removal of additional IBM-specific sections, language, and assumptions. The Quick Start Guide is our first priority, but work on any of the manuals is welcome.
The protocol documentation which we received from IBM in PDF format has been converted to Microsoft Word .DOC files. These documents need to be further converted to DocBook, be reformatted, and have the Table of Contents and Index sections rebuilt using the appropriate tags. After this work is complete, the OpenAFS developers can work to update the documentation to match the current implementation.
Work on OpenAFS's documentation is coordinated on the openafs-doc@openafs.org mailing list. Before starting work on a large project, please mention the work on that mailing list so that we can avoid duplicating effort.
The 2008 Workshop will be held at NJIT in Newark, NJ, the week of May 19-23, 2008. There is a block of rooms available at Newark Penn Station Hilton. For more information on the workshop, please visit: http://workshop.openafs.org/afsbpw08/.
OpenAFS Council of Elders - Next MeetingDecember 11, 2007