development roadmap

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

It's time to get this show on the road!  We are going to start right now
on ramping up elfutils development work.  I intend to carry on all the
planning and development discussions on this mailing list, and keep
track of things on https://fedorahosted.org/elfutils/wiki/.

I've started fleshing out immediate work priorities at:

	https://fedorahosted.org/elfutils/wiki/RoadMap

I will be adding much more to that over the next 24 hours.

We have the challenging goal of delivering a polished solution for DWARF
size reduction and integrating it into the rpm build system for the
Fedora 11 release.  The tentative deadline for when this would ideally
be all well and done is the beginning of March.  With a holiday break
coming soon, that is not much more than two months from now.  

Currently I think for this we can bank on a >50% time commitment from me
and >50% from Petr Machata.  I hope we can get each of those numbers
closer to 80% for a solid push of work in January through February.  I
also hope we'll be able to get at least a big chunk of one other person.
But we'll have to see about that, and we can't afford to wait to get started.

We will have to be extremely aggressive to have any chance of making
that delivery target.  This will require staying much more closely
organized and schedule-oriented certainly than I've been managing
heretofore.  To that end, I'll try to be quite demanding both of myself
and of the active contributors, to communicate frequently and to adjust
quickly to keep focus on the fastest progress where we need it most.

I don't see a need for scheduled meetings or anything, rather than just
email (or IRC when people like to).  But I would like to have a
mandatory status update from each active contributor that is both
regular and frequent.  (I mean this to apply to those trying to work to
this schedule, to start with just me and Petr.  If Ulrich wants to give
us regular updates that would be great, but we don't have his time to
allocate to this roadmap's scheduled items.)

I propose that each active contributor post a required status update to
this list, either at the end of the work week or on Monday.
Specifically, each must post by 23:59 UTC each Monday.  
The update should include:

	* portion of time planned for elfutils work this week
	* last's week's planned portion and actual portion spent
	* items to do this week, rough time estimates
	* each of last week's status items with percent complete, elaboration

Status postings don't need a lot of detail.  They need to be made
consistently every week, and be realistic about where the time went.
The focus is to ensure we stay on track for realistic schedules of the
work.  If non-elfutils work is taking more time than expected for
someone this week, we need to notice quickly and see what can be done.
Try to be both realistic and ambitious about what you can do in each
week.  Don't worry about over-committing--there's no black mark in
planning something for this week and not getting to it.  But don't just
say everything you can think of each week (note to self ;-), we need to
stay sensible about what will actually get finished when.

Ok?

We can start this week, today.  I'll post my personal status by 23:59 UTC.
These items should be on everyone's list to do this week:

* prepare for git migration
  (merge up personal branches in mtn; look at test git repo)
* use the wiki
* post things on your mind to elfutils-devel


Thanks,
Roland