Add an introduction for the 2015Q3 report

Discussed with:	wblock
This commit is contained in:
Benjamin Kaduk 2015-10-25 17:28:02 +00:00
parent ccdaa7bc3e
commit 29dd72779e
Notes: svn2git 2020-12-08 03:00:23 +00:00
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an announcement email is sent to the &os;-Announce mailing
list.</strong></p>
<?ignore
<p>This report covers &os;-related projects between July and
September 2015. This is the third of four reports planned for
2015.</p>
<p>The third quarter of 2015, from July to September, was
again a period of busy activity for &os;: for the second quarter
in a row we have the largest report yet published.</p>
<p>The third quarter of 2015 was another productive quarter for
the &os; project and community. [...]</p>
<p>The Foundation continues to play a strong role, bringing
both a developer and evangelist presence to conferences, funding
much of the hardware that the cluster administration team uses to
keep things running, and sponsoring many development projects for
&os;. This quarter we also hear from some of the student projects
funded by Google Summer of Code 2015, ranging a wide gamut from
the bootloader to additional ARM support, but also at a range of
completion status. Some of the GSoC output is in the tree
already, but others could benefit from additional attention to
help out our budding new contributors as their schedules fill with
the return to classes.</p>
<p>Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work!</p>
<p>ZFS and the network stack continue to be strong areas for
&os;, with both receiving active maintenance and feature
improvements during this quarter. Substantial work continues on
arm64, potentially putting it on the path toward a promotion to
Tier-1 status, and a new port to the RISC-V architecture has
made great headway in a short period of time. But it is not just
our strengths and exciting new areas that have seen attention this
cycle; there are also some parts of the system that are frequently
perceived as unchanging infrastructure that have received
attention and improvements, with <tt>truss</tt> and
(<tt>k</tt>)<tt>gdb</tt> receiving significant overhauls, new
implementations for the man page tools being brought in, the
website receiving a new skin, and a brand new infrastructure for
translating documentation that greatly lowers the barrier to
entry.</p>
<p>The deadline for submissions covering the period from October
to December 2015 is January 7, 2016.</p>
?>
<p>Nonetheless, despite its record length, this report does
not and cannot cover all of the work being done on &os; throughout
the reporting period &mdash; there are many bug fixes too minor to
mention here, and developers too busy working on the next project
to write up an entry for the previous project. It is not just the
developers committing to Subversion that comprise the ongoing
activities of &os;, but also the users testing unreleased
code or reporting bugs in released code, and participants on the
mailing lists and forums helping each other solve their problems.
Even the chats on IRC that wander far from the stated topic of a
channel contribute to the community around &os;; it is that
community whose effectiveness and helpfulness is a key component
of the effectiveness and usefulness of &os; itself. Not just to
the developers listed in this report, but to everyone in the
community, thank you for making &os; a great operating system.</p>
<p><i>&mdash;Ben Kaduk</i></p>
<p><hr /></p>
<p>Please submit status reports for the fourth quarter of 2015
(from October to December) by January 7, 2016.</p>
</section>
<category>