There has been a lot of discussions lately about changing how the CFEngine releases work, and what we want is to have something that is more systematic and predictable. There are many points that need to be considered, for instance:
How often should we release a new feature release?
How often will people actually upgrade? How often would contributors like to see new releases (with their fixes in)? How long should feature releases be supported?
Configuration Management Camp in Ghent, Belgium is coming up, and CFEngine is of course going there! This year we’ll be sending two of CFEngine’s core developers, Dimitrios Apostolou and myself, Kristian Amlie. Our currently planned talks for the event are:
How to securely deploy CFEngine in the open Internet: manage trust, provide selective access to policies, securely bootstrap new hosts and revoke old ones. CFEngine releases, how do they happen?
It’s sometimes difficult to maintain an overview over what issues matter most to the CFEngine community. Unfortunately our bug tracker, Redmine, has very poor support for letting the developers know what issues are important to the users, and prioritize according to this. So lately we have been looking into using the watcher count as a way to measure interest in issues. For clarity the watcher count is the number of people who have pressed the “Watch” button on a Redmine issue.
