[Soc-coordination] Status Report of ZFS on Linux Integration, Week 0

[Aron Xu]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 8:46 AM, David Bremner <bremner at debian.org> wrote:
> Aron Xu <happyaron.xu at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> During the past days, I did the following things:
>>
>>  1. Started reading Oracle ZFS Administration Guide
>>  2. Continued my previous work on all kinds of license auditing.
>>  3. Continued to assess the status quo and to check things out on Aloith's Git.
>
> Hi Aron;
>
> Can you tell us a few more details? How did what you accomplished this
> week compare to your plan? What do you plan to accomplish next week? Can
> you point us to some of your work (for example, version control
> repository or patches in a mailing list).
>
> Thanks,
>
> David
>

Basically this week I continued the work that has been done before
this GSoC project get accepted, and the goal is to have a working set
of spl/zfs packages ready to upload. The license audit part is
finished and I'll check current content of debian/copyright and update
it when needed. As for technical side, current Git repository[1] is
building and working, while my mentor and I have an agreement that
filesystem is something that must be dealt with special care, and we
want to make sure user's data do not suffer from overlook of design,
so this part is mostly assess the status quo and to check for possible
flaws in the way we handle the package, and there will be more details
posted once the work has been finished (with big/minor change). As
I'll be taking final exams[2] very soon so I'm not putting many load
on myself about the project right now.

A list of known situations:

1. SPL/ZFS does not see any license problem to fit into main in dkms
form so far.

2. FTP team is in doubt about having zfs in binary form in the
archive, i.e. udeb. There is a conversation with them (still waiting
for a second reply), and will have impact on the way d-i support is
provided.

3. Upstream and Debian kfreebsd people think zpool v5000 would be
good, but Grub2 currently only supports v28 without third-party
patches.

4. A (re-)implementation of dkms module dependency support (or
equivalent) would make the packaging much more clearer. I've already
have plans and will start conversation with upstream first. Current
patch is in an embarrassing state by copyright/license, so I don't
think it's good to disclose every detail before achieving an agreement
with upstream.


[1]http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/spl.git
    http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git
[2]Already mentioned in my application.

-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu