In October we held a joint Planning Committee and Technology Working Group meeting due to scheduling conflicts. Development has continued for iRODS 4.2 as well as a gathering of issues for a 4.1.7 release driven by two memory leaks reported from the field.
As it was a joint meeting, we had a brief agenda for the TWG:
We have completed the preliminary work to automate the configuration of Kerberos for the final authentication plugin. These scripts are now being ported to our Anisble framework to finalize the deployment for CI. Kerberos is our final plugin requiring migration, leaving only Federation and Run-In-Place as features requiring deployment in CI.
We will issue another release of iRODS given a couple memory leaks reported from the field. We have also included several updates to the Compound Resource plugin which will provide options to invoke more legacy-style behavior as well as a fix for iphymv which allows migrating data objects between child resources.
The current focus for iRODS 4.2 has been in three areas: building packages for external dependencies, refactoring the setup scripts, and refactoring the RPC API system into a proper plugin framework.
The external dependencies build on all supported platforms, with some additional effort needed to smooth out issues for run-in-place on OSX.
The set up scripts are passing the tests, and require a bit of additional work for python on older systems.
Refactoring of the RPC API is necessary in order to integrate the Rule Engine Plugin framework. The current implementation does not support Dynamic Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) which is a desirable feature. Also, in order to pass complex types to other languages, such as python, we require a new serialization technology. In anticipation of the upcoming next generation API, we have elected to use Avro to pass the various data structures between the existing system and the Rule Engine plugins.