[General] Proposal for 'tools' project

[Mikeal Rogers]

Recently in QA and release engineering we've noticed that a lot of  
small tools that have been or are currently being developed don't  
directly belong in one of the three main projects we have at OSAF  
(Chandler, Cosmo, Scooby).

Examples of such tools are the Cosmo test tools (TestObject and  
HTTPTest) which are also going to be used for testing scooby  
(inherited by JSONTest). Another example is bear's recent project  
(Kagami). And going forward we see a lot more tools being written  
that follow the same trend.

The main issue is that these tools either belong in multiple project  
repositories or in none of our current project repositories. Also,  
the tools are usually developed with a commiter list different than  
that of the main project (example: commiter for HTTPTest may not be  
commiter for Cosmo)

We are defining tool as any project that doesn't contain any product  
specific code. Example: HTTPTest would be a tool, but the scripts  
written for testing cosmo would still remain in the cosmo repository.

We obviously can't treat each tool as it's own project, giving it  
isn't own list, repository, etc. So it was proposed that we create a  
"tools" project, which could be used as a catch-all for the various  
projects that come under this category. The tools could be developed  
in this repository and commiter rules governed by the maintainer's of  
the tool (obviously following the larger OSAF commiter guidelines).  
We could also use the "tools" list to discuss issues that don't  
directly affect the main projects.

The largest implication in all of this is probably the fact that some  
of the tools for testing some projects are going to become  
dependencies of that project since they live outside the project's  
repository. Which means tools have to be on a release cycle and  
versioned.

In QA we're ready to commit to a release cycle for all tools and a  
new policy that all main product (Chandler, Cosmo, Scooby) releases  
go through a test cycle using only released tools.

Note: CATS does not fall under tools because it does not meet the  
requirement of containing no product specific code.