Release Meeting Minutes/2009-02-03

Meeting notes for 2009-02-03:

• Will is still working on the master key migration code. We had some discussion of process for getting changes onto the trunk and marking them for pullup to the release branch. He'll be fixing some bugs and working on documentation and testing.
• Ken will be seeing about getting the Windows build to work, or at least parts of it.
• The 1.7-alpha1 release is out. Not much feedback on it yet.
• Bugfixes and documentation will be the major order of the next few months, along with test cases for new code.
• People should make notes about any impediments to migrating away from single DES, as that is a priority for the next few releases.
• Zhana asked if it's okay to use Python in the test suite (which means running all of the test suite will require having Python installed). We decided that that's okay; we should try use language features present in Python 2.3 since that's about the oldest version one will find on a vaguely modern operating system.
• We briefly discussed options for language bindings to facilitate testing (SWIG, Pyrex, etc.), as well as the most preferrable language for this purpose (probably perl or python).
• Greg brought up trace debugging and whether the gcc instrument-functions option would be good enough, since it wouldn't require manually instrumenting source code. Consensus was that it probably isn't good enough for all scenarios, but some people would like to know how to use it anyway. For better tracing (function arguments, how a function returns, etc.) we will need to make source code changes. Greg will write up something for the list on using gcc instrumentation for now.