iRODS Development Update: April 2015
This month we will cover the minutes from the Technology Working Group, and we will review the run-up to the 4.1 feature freeze at the end April (today).
Technology Working Group
The TWG met on April 10th, where we covered several topics:
- Review of 4.1 with a June release
- We reviewed new features, open and outstanding issues
- Call for testing
- Post-feature freeze, we are inviting community members to field test engineering builds before the June release
- Open discussion of version 4.2
- Our focus for the next year, also the floor has been opened for Member and Community feature requests
- WebDAV demo
- Dan demonstrated the new WebDAV interface for iRODS
- Cesar’s progress
- Screenshots of the next generation iRODS Web interface framework
- Parallel restart for Jargon
- discussion of the issues surrounding reliability of parallel transfers
Development Highlights
Feature Freeze
In the past month we have had an energetic run-up to the 4.1 feature freeze. Per our statistics on GitHub we have closed 97 issues (31 enhancements, 46 bugs) in April. As of April 30th, we are no longer accepting enhancements and will continue our work in closing the last 24 issues and polishing the release.
Call for Testing
Once the feature freeze is past and things settle down in Continuous Integration we will post links to engineering builds which we invite our members and community to test. Please put iRODS 4.1 through its paces, try new features and help to shake out any of the lingering bugs that lead to point releases. We will keep a close eye on GitHub for new bugs to fix, and pull requests are always welcome. Please note that there will be no supported upgrade path from the engineering builds, these packages are strictly for testing only.
Overview of 4.1
- Weighted Passthru
- new feature allowing the passthru coordinating resource plugin to weight votes in order to allow programmatic direction of resource hierarchy behavior
- Zero-length files now trigger resource hierarchy behavior (e.g. replication)
- Key-Value passthrough for iCommands
- users can now pass configuration to resource plugins via iput and iget
- No config files in packages, cleaner upgrades
- Full move to JSON configuration
- Use OpenSSL MD5/SHA1 implementation
- Schema Validation on all configuration files and the izonereport output
- Core code is Coverity Clean
- 1,099 Fixed
- 35 Outstanding, all boost/compiler related
- Federation Testing is now captured in a testing suite, soon to be
added to CI
- master \<-> 4.0.3
- master \<-> 3.3.1
iRODS Cloud Browser development
Cesar from the Consortium team is working on the new Cloud Browser. It is a reference user interface designed in concert with DICE to demonstrate key iRODS capabilities as well as some experimental features that may eventually migrate into the iRODS core.
This month's development has been functional code representing the basic layout, login/logout, and file upload/download. The two screenshots below show multiselect and a details page about an iRODS Data Object.
Jason Coposky