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? Learn how bug fixes, optimizations and features are scheduled for releases. Also a sneak peek at upcoming developments for CFEngine 3.7, and some time for discussion. Finding the problem: Learn how to triage bugs in CFEngine. Also learn how to write an acceptance test. There will of course be plenty of other talks as well and a good chance to meet the guys that make CFEngine happen! And of course you’ll be able to catch talks from other Configuration Management providers as well.
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. Redmine doesn’t have built in support for filtering according to watcher count, but we have built our own custom query tool to get this information. So we hereby encourage the community to press “Watch” on all the issues that are important to them! We can of course not guarantee that all issues with many watchers will be resolved, but it certainly increases the odds that the particular issue makes it towards the top of the list. For technical reasons we can’t publish our query, but below is a sneak peek at the current list: The top 25 issues as of right now, according to watcher count. Merry Christmas!
