Topic: Developers meet June 2022

[ReetP]

Doing this as a post rather than announce as this is only a general summary of things.

So Mark Phillips has taken on the role of trying to organise us a bit more.

This is highly annoying as we have to pay attention and be more serious

So we had a developers meet on the 11th June over Jitsi. It's really nice to see faces and just chat - we could have been there half the day/night just yacking!!

The reality is we have a mountain of things to do and it really helps to crystallise things and get a bit of a plan together which focuses the mind.

So, a rough precis of discussions.

Planning

• We are going to set up our own SME instance with things like nextcloud with shared documents so we can be a bit more organised
• We are going to try and hold Dev meets every 2 months or so with alternating times as we are spread around the globe which make it quite hard. Trying to avoid waking his better half, poor old Terry missed his 4am uptime
• We are giving more permissions to various bits of the infra to help Jean Philippe. We would welcome anyone with dev & sysadmin experience to come and help us
• Build system - see below
• I have suggested we do a 'Webinar' at some point where you can come and ask us questions - either directly or by text/writing - even write them beforehand. See this post and let us know.
  https://forums.koozali.org/index.php/topic,54825.0.html
  
• We have used my test instance of Rocket.Chat as a tool to discuss issues - it really helped us get v10 out of the door.
  We really need to move this to the Koozali infra. We can then open it up easily to others via LDAP and the existing logins for say forums. BUT for that we'd probably need an enterprise licence - as an open source project I think we can get one for free but I need to check.
  We think there is a Rocket.Chat plugin for Nextcloud too.
  As an alternative we could use Element/Matrix
  You can get me on @reetp:matrix.org if you want to test it. There is a Koozali group I formed for testing.
  However, Matrix will almost certainly need an enterprise licence for LDAP, and for easy migration. And I am not sure they do a free one like Rocket.Chat
  

Product Roadmap

Koozali SME v10

• Release Goals
  Time is ticking on CentOS 7. It is EOL at the end of June 2024. We are acutely aware and do not need reminding. And don't say we haven't told you!!
  We plan to do one more release of v10. Current target is the end of 2022.
  Bug matrix for 10.1
  https://bugs.koozali.org/buglist.cgi?action=wrap&bug_status=CONFIRMED&list_id=98121&product=SME%20Server%2010.X&target_milestone=10.1
  
  The two main issues with releases are first the time it takes to build and test, and second is whether any upstream updates have broken the installer which is a really tricky bit of code. We can lose a lot of time trying to fix it!!
  
• Milestones
  The DMARC issue has been moved to v11 as it requires a lot of new dependencies which are hard to build on v10. We may try and backport it later
  Contribs backup
  
• Find and apply utility to document package APIs (phase 1)
  

Koozali SME v11

• If you want to see this sooner rather than later please come and get involved.
  We will be using Rocky Linux as our new base after the decisions taken by Redhat with CentOS. We feel it is most closely aligned with our open source goals.
• Release Goals:
  https://wiki.koozali.org/SME_Server_wishlist#SME_Server_11.X
  Very tentative - huge risk of falling behind!
  SME 11.0 alpha release spring 2023
  SME 11.0 release for summer of 2023
  
• Milestones:
  New server manager UI
  DMARC update
  LDAP resolution
  SSL certificate UX
  Replace qmail with postfix, keep qpsmtp
  DNS change to bind
  IPv6 - possible Shorewall firewall/Zones etc
  
• Tasks:
  Our current system of buildsys/CVS/Plague is very long in the tooth. Currently we can't get Plague to build on CentOS 8/Rocky 8 and we may never be able too. So, we are going to migrate to git and koji.  Current target date is by January 2023
  Once we have the build system in place we can start to try and build packages for v11. With Koji we can possibly build Rocky 9/Koozali v12 at the same time. This would be a big leap forward.
  Update documentation of package APIs (phase 2)
  

===================================

There were probably other minor items discussed but these were the main talking points.

A lot depends on the available time of the few who actually code here. Remember, we are ALL unpaid volunteers. We do what we can, when we can.

We are always desperate for helping hands. You do NOT need to be developer to help. We just need a bit of your time.
Wiki editing is massively important. Testing and verifying bugs is too. Anyone can do it. So please just ask. You can DM me here.
If you want a Rocket.Chat login again just ask. Most of the chat is dev orientated but we are happy to talk to anyone who is interested in Koozali SME. It is a good place to read and learn.

We'll keep you updated with news as it happens.

Thanks

Team Koozali

*Edit to C7 EOL Date