Notes20100607

Net-SNMP Meeting
2010-06-07

Previous:	2010-05-17
Next:	2010-07-19

This is the meeting agenda/notes for the Meeting held on 2010-06-07.

Date and Time: 2010-06-07 20:00 UTC

Agenda

• Next Meeting Date
  • July 19th
• Releases
  • 5.2.x -- dts12
    • 5.2.6 is out!
  • 5.4.x -- dts12
    • 5.4.3 is out!
  • 5.6 -- hardaker
    • pre1 this week
  • Release Testing
    • hardaker hasn't made progress on the results mailer yet
    • It would be a good idea to mention the output mailer in the pre1 release announcement
    • Wiki page would be a good idea: Test Results with subpages per release
    • hardaker has a reference to a build/package system he needs to look into that may be like the old SF build system that went away
  • Binary Releases
    • Still need to fill out the Release Instructions webpage
• Administrative
• Technical Discussions
  • Test infrastructure -- hardaker
  • Whether or not the triple build infrastructure should be unified to a single build infrastructure.
    • EG, CMake
    • hardaker has a plan to extract the module changing and header generation functionality to an external script so that people can just run the header generation scripts without running full configure
      • Ideally it should be called from configure, but it could also be inline-sourced in both locations
  • Net-SNMP V5 get/set request handler documentation [1].
    • Real issues:
      1. man pages and online copies are often out of date
         • hardaker will try to add more automation to the release generation script near 5.6 publication
      2. no high-level tutorial about how the internal of the agent works
      3. tutorials need more data
      4. many man pages are too small or useless
         • Dave will come up with a list of potential man page changes/cut-list and post to -coders
  • Perl
    • NetSNMP::agent regression test 5 fails [2].
    • Status of CPAN (5.4.1)
      • Wes explains the history:

[12:40] <hardaker> so I'll start with history
[12:40] <hardaker> Way back in the day when Giovanni Marzot wrote the original perl binding he put it in CPAN.
[12:41] <hardaker> Then I met him and we had a good long conversation about how much of a pain C-bindings are in CPAN
[12:41] <hardaker> we agreed that we'd move the core source to Net-SNMP itself so that it could be more easily aligned.
[12:41] <hardaker> that's all been well and dandy.
[12:41] <hardaker> then we started updating CPAN again after most-major-version-updated
[12:41] <hardaker> at which point a few people started screaming.
[12:42] <hardaker> the versions are tightly bound (and there is a version check to ensure that you compile the right perl module against the  right Net-SNMP source )
[12:42] <hardaker> so...  if CPAN has 5.6, for example, but you have 5.5.3 on your system you'll get:
[12:42] <hardaker> 1) an update suggestion from CPAN if you use CPAN to manage your verisons
[12:43] <hardaker> 2) a make soft-error saying you have a version mismatch if you try to let CPAN update it
[12:43] <hardaker> Now, someone has complained that the CPAN source is too old.
[12:43] <hardaker> I don't have a solution.
[12:43] <hardaker> there is no version to put in CPAN that will leave people happy.
[12:43] <hardaker> so suggestions welcome about what version we should publish to CPAN.

• • • • No resolution today; many different versions have many different Net-SNMP source bundles
  • jsafranek: hrFSTable and hrStorageTable persistent indexes - partially implemented in new host/hrh_filesys.c and hardware/fsys/*, but I miss some pieces :(
    • Done! Thanks to dts12
  • Cygwin --enable-shared build [3]: only possible if the circular dependency between libnetsnmpagent and libnetsnmphelpers is resolved -- see also [4]. What is the status of this last issue ?
    • done!
  • "Zero compiler warnings" policy for 5.6+?
    • Thanks especially to Bart, we're down to very few compiler warnings in trunk. Shall we adopt a "Zero compiler warnings" policy from now onwards (not applying to 5.5.x and earlier), meaning that newly introduced warnings need to be fixed ASAP?
    • Nice in theory, but very difficult in practice to do architecture/compiler, etc, differences
• Round Table -- What are ya up to?
  • hardaker: (D)TLS and testing
  • magfr: settable paths (The ability to set the search paths in the generated binaries independently of the prefix.)
  • dts12: investigate inline documentation