From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 17 06:15:27 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id GAA02898 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 17 May 1995 06:15:27 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id GAA02891 ; Wed, 17 May 1995 06:15:25 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: freefall.cdrom.com: Host localhost didn't use HELO protocol To: core@FreeBSD.org cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: TODO list for 2.0.5 Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 06:15:24 -0700 Message-ID: <2890.800716524@freefall.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Rod has been pestering me about this for a few days, so as I have a quick moment to breath right now (doing a make in another window :) I'll oblige him and the rest of you who may also be wondering. First off, I just want to make it clear that the first and foremost thing holding up 2.0.5 right at the moment is sysinstall, and for that I make no excuses. It's taken me significantly longer than planned (several weeks) to write this from scratch, and writing it from scratch was more or less mandated by the write-only install code we did for 2.0R and its failure in the face of the new "slice" code. In any case, we're almost out of the woods with that and I hope to have it fully functional in as short a time as possible (days, not weeks). However, there are a number of other things that need doing for 2.0.5 so without further ado, here's the list. All of these things are considered _mandatory_ for 2.0.5 by me and others, so if nobody else steps forward for a task then I'll do it myself, but it *will* get done before 2.0.5R goes out the door so bear in mind that your volunteering for one or more of these tasks will have a significant (positive) impact on 2.0.5's ship date! Task: HW.DOC Assigned: Gary Palmer, Justin Gibbs Status: Open. They need help with this. Detail: A document needs to be generated that documents the following 3 things: 1. All the options in the GENERIC kernel need to be documented in terms of what the user's hardware should be configured to do in order to match GENERIC's view of the world. This could be done as a fairly simple table, with the device names down the left and their port/irq/drq/memory address information in columns. 2. All the options in LINT that work and aren't in GENERIC need to be listed as "add-on" options readily available to the user but simply not enabled by default. This includes things like the PS/2 mouse or Video Spigot driver. User's should be made aware of it when their hardware IS supported but simply not turned on in GENERIC for one reason or another (which should probably also be explained in each case). Point the user at the Kernel configuration section (6) of the FAQ for more details. 3. Troubleshooting. This should document things like the -c flag and how/when to use it. It should also point out potential conflict problems that we've experienced (bogus PCI configuration, cylinder translation bogons, etc) and how to deal with them. 4. Bonus section (optional): Prototype hardware configurations at the $1K, $2K, $3K and $5K price-points (or perhaps classified by type, e.g. workstation, router, enterprise server, development box, etc. I don't really care). People are always asking us "what should I buy to run FreeBSD?" and we should do our best to answer them, if we can, even if it's with "these prices are highly changable and for guideline purposes ONLY!" stamped all over it. If you can provide 4-5 "popular combo configurations" then I'd say people would be more than pleased. -*- Task: README Assigned: Gary Palmer, Justin Gibbs Status: Open. He needs help with this. Detail: A general README file, along the lines of the old one, needs to be written. I can supply the marketspeak ("Welcome to FreeBSD 2.0.5! Now curing cancer and turning water into wine at an FTP site near you!") but I need someone to accumulate more raw material as to what we've DONE for 2.0.5 and try to put into a more coherent description of what 2.0.5 IS. This could conceivably be split into 2 documents - a general README describing FreeBSD and 2.0.5 Release Notes; I really don't care at this stage. :-) -*- Task: INSTALL Assigned: Jordan Status: Open. Not even started yet. Detail: A general step-by-step guide for using sysinstall needs to be written. I'm probably stuck with doing this alone, unless someone wants to jump aboard with sysinstall in -current and start documenting the various screens, and I wouldn't fight that at all! :-) If each screen were fairly fully documented (see the *.hlp files referenced in /usr/src/release/sysinstall/menus.c) then the installation guide could be fairly short! As it was, I was going to make a long installation guide and lots of short screen help files, which strikes me as less optimal. -*- Task: FAQ Assigned: The FreeBSD Doc Project Status: Open. Detail: The FAQ needs to be updated for 2.0.5 and generally made more relevant to the bits we're about to release. This is John Fieber's coordination task, but I just thought I'd mention it here as something that needs to be gone over before I stick it on the boot floppy. -*- Task: sysinstall Assigned: Jordan Status: In Progress Detail: As I said in the opening paragraph, I'm working on this now to the exclusion of almost all else, but I felt it would be useful to note it in the list. I still have some outstanding problems with sysinstall which I may NOT get to if someone else doesn't jump in here, and those are probably worth noting: 1. DOS batch files for creating *dist copies on disk or floppy. When you've got an unsupported CDROM (say an IDE CDROM, which is a rather disgustingly popular item these days) you are left with little recourse but to boot DOS, which does have drivers for your CDROM, and copy the stuff onto lots of floppies or try and find some hard disk space and copy the relevant files there. The problem has always been a great lack of clarity as to just exactly which _are_ the relevant files. We all know that you need a bindist at the minimum, and that a bindist consists of many bin.* files, accompanied by extract.sh and do_cksum.sh scripts, but the poor new user has no way of knowing that. Some nice DOS batch file(s) which I could invoke from Walnut Creek's DOS viewer program would go a long way towards making it less necessary to know such things. You'd just select the appropriate option, wait for it to copy the files or prompt you to insert floppies until your arm fell off, and then read the last "what to do from here" instructions before booting the boot floppy. 2. Multi-lingual support. This is actually something I *really want* to get into sysinstall, given that I've got a whole team put together for doing the translations and it would be a damn shame to waste the opportunity, but I'm a little worried by the fact that the simple "usage.hlp" file I did as an initial test does NOT display properly in syscons! I'm doing all I think need to be done to set the font and (in the case of Russian) screenmap up correctly, but it's not working. If someone could take a look at lang.c and system.c in sysinstall and tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'd sure appreciate it! -*- Task: packages Assigned: Satoshi & Team Status: In Progress Detail: I need a collection of packages to put in the CDROM at some point. I also need someone to go through LEGAL and make sure that nothing's slipped through. I know that Satoshi is already working flat-out on this, and has some testing in progress, I only note it for completeness. -*- That pretty much sums it up, actually. The tree seems quite stable right now, and there are no really bad bugs that I know about that need fixing. There are a number of features I could think of wanting, but we're in code freeze and it's not about wanted features it's about show-stoppers at this point. Jordan