[General] [Last Call] Proposal for 'tools' project

[Mikeal Rogers]

I haven't gotten any feedback and it sounds like this proposal is  
rather uncontroversial.

If we don't receive feedback by EOD Friday we'll consider the  
proposal signed off on and move forward.

-Mikeal

On Jun 12, 2006, at 3:57 PM, Mikeal Rogers wrote:

> 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.