The NetBSD Foundation 2004 Annual Report

The NetBSD Foundation held its Annual Group Meeting of all members of the NetBSD Foundation, i.e. all NetBSD developers. From the more than 200 active developers, 65 made it to the meeting, which took place from 22:00 UTC to midnight on January 15th 2005. This is a report from the presentations of the various groups within the NetBSD project about their past achievements and future Goals. This report is mostly a verbatim version of the text presented in the online meeting, with a few places edited slightly, marked by "[...]".

  1. Welcome and Intro remarks (Christos Zoulas)
  2. Presentations from the Executive Committees
      a. Technical exec (Alistair Crooks)
         - core (Allen Briggs)
         - security-officer (Daniel Carosone)
         - releng (James Chacon)
         - pkgsrc (Johnny Lam)
        b. Communications exec (Tracy Di Marco White)
           - www (Jan Schaumann)
        c. Finance exec (Lex Wennmacher)
        d. Membership exec (Thomas Klausner)
        e. Administration exec (Tracy Di Marco White)
    3. Any Other Business
    4. Closing remarks (Christos Zoulas)

Christos Zoulas, president of The NetBSD Foundation, first introduced the members of the current Board of Directors:

Christos thanked both personally and on behalf of the Board of Directors the two departing members Chris Demetriou and Luke Mewburn for their hard work during the past two years. Chris led the Foundation as President two years ago (followed by Christos in the past year) and Luke is the current secretary and during the past year was instrumental in organizing and overseeing the selection of our new Logo.

Next, Christos welcomed the two new Board members Alistair Crooks and Perry Metzger who will be replacing Chris and Luke and their term will begin at the end of this meeting.

Finally he thanked the chair of the Nomination Committee Jim Wise and its members, as well as Thomas Klausner who was our Election Administrator and Simon Gerraty who was the Election Validator for the Board Election.

Last, Christos thanked everyone involved in the Executive Committees who spend a lot of time, both visibly and behind the scenes to keep the Foundation running.

His congratulations went to the pkgsrc members for constantly improving a very high quality product, to the www team for keeping our website up-to-date, to the systems administration group for persevering despite all the hardware failures, and to the release engineering group for managing to push 2.0 out of the door. His personal thanks also went to Lex and Tracy for taking over a lot of what used to be his responsibilities and doing a better job than him.

Christos wished the new Board members Alistair and Perry a successful and fruitful Board term.

After he was done with the introductions Christos gave a bit of a personal perspective to his involvement with NetBSD that has been going on for the past 12 years:

``I joined NetBSD after lurking in the in the mailing
  lists because I was truly impressed by the level of technical
  expertise and the quality of the source code. I started as a
  developer who did not know left from right on how anything in the
  kernel worked (and some might say that I still don't) and ended up
  being the President of the Foundation.
  
  I am saying all this because I feel that our future depends on our
  ability to attract, recruit, teach, organize, and guide new talented
  people who are going to be the future of the project. As a volunteer
  effort we depend on the generous time and resource offers of the
  members our community.
  
  We all have other obligations in our lives - both personal and
  professional - which take precedence to NetBSD, so I understand how
  difficult it is to allocate time on a consistent basis for a volunteer
  program. I can say that my involvement has been very rewarding for me
  both in improving my technical knowledge, and making me feel
  appreciated for contributing to something that I do for fun and not
  for financial gains.
  
  I want to encourage everyone to think of ways to become more involved
  with the running of the project. I value your opinion and need your
  help to improve NetBSD. It is easy to sit back and complain about our
  faults and deficiencies, but a lot harder to fix them. As a community
  we excel in criticizing everything but when it comes to take
  responsibility to making changes and fixing the problems only a few of
  us step up to the plate.
  
  Working on an Operating System is very challenging - more so now than
  before. Ten years ago neither Windows or Linux were serious
  competitors both in the functionality and stability axes. Now both
  offer more features than we do, and they have behind them the
  resources of very large commercial organizations. If that was not
  enough competition, there is a plethora of other operating system
  choices each trying to fill a niche. Even our close siblings FreeBSD
  and OpenBSD have developed certain features we still lack.
  
  Are we becoming irrelevant? Is it time to give up?  I don't believe
  that either is true. I see our competition facing challenges of their
  own. Linux keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has
  stability issues. It now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and
  make stable releases of the code. FreeBSD took over the huge task to
  implement fine grain SMP and after two years of effort they still
  don't have a production quality system. OpenBSD is still touting its
  security features but lacks the manpower to integrate major kernel
  features such as UBC and address performance problems. Instead it
  focuses in supporting and re-implementing major userland
  utilities. The Windows release cycles keep getting longer and longer
  and promised features keep getting postponed because of the increasing
  complexity of the operating system. Sun is trying to keep Solaris
  relevant by open-sourcing it, but nobody is certain of what is going
  to be open-sourced and when. Apple's Darwin effort does not seem to be
  producing any useful results, possibly because it is not complete, and
  the open-source version of the tree is always behind the commercial
  version.
  
  So where does that leave us? What is the purpose of NetBSD?
  
  I see a lot of opportunities ahead for us. We've managed to release
  2.0 this year and we have integrated major features without serious
  regressions or performance issues. We can leverage a lot of the work
  in FreeBSD and OpenBSD to improve some of the areas we are lacking. We
  have the cleanest source tree and our wealth of hardware support makes
  us a very attractive porting target. Our cross-building capabilities
  have made it possible to support the plethora of ports with much less
  effort than before. Our BSD style license allows vendors to use our
  code without suffering the intellectual properly loss dilemma
  presented by the GPL. We have our work cut out for us and we need
  work hard in the areas we are behind in order to remain relevant.
  
  What are our challenges ahead?  Our goals are divided broadly in three
  categories.
  
  The first category is technical:
  
   - We need a better filesystem. We need a filesystem that will support
     the ever growing disk sizes, does not need hours of fsck after a
     crash, supports snapshots, replication and comes with a volume
     management system that allows us to add and remove devices
     dynamically. It would be nice for the filesystem to be able to
     handle hardware faults gracefully by keeping multiple copies of
     critical data, and being partially accessible.
   
   - We need real-time scheduling support, POSIX real-time extensions,
     and thread-safe libraries. There is an increasing number of
     applications related to video, voice, and control that need hard
     real-time support. We can start by bullet-proofing our thread
     support and finishing the re-entrancy issues with our libraries,
     then continue by evaluating real-time scheduling and making
     subsystems of our kernel able to use multiple processors.
   
   - We should modernize our network stack. Features such as SACK and ECN
     are becoming necessary. We should support multiple default routes,
     load balancing and throughput control. We need to fix our firewall
     software immediately and in the longer run come up with something
     cleaner and more extensible.
   
   - We should improve our internationalization support.
   
   - We need to replace our Loadable Kernel Module support with a real
     kernel linker that will allow us to make the kernel more dynamic.
   
   - We need better ACPI support that includes suspend and resume.
   
   - As a longer term goal we should look into clustering, process
     migration, and redundancy support.
   
   - We should take advantage of pkgsrc to provide workstation or server
     type systems with groups of software that can be easily installed on
     top of the base installation semi-automatically.
   
  I don't think that I am saying anything new here.
  
  The second category is administrative:
  
   - We need to produce more frequent releases. We must provide timely
     response to security issues and have a better mechanism to supply
     patches to supported releases.
  
   - We need to institute better testing and try to provide more timely
     feedback and concentrate on closing important bug reports. We should
     also improve our installation process. While it is easy to install
     NetBSD in our more popular platforms, it can be pretty daunting to
     install on the more exotic ones.
  
   - We need to make our committees more responsive and transparent. We
     need to institute and document policies, protect our intellectual
     property and trademarks, and get more people involved. We have too
     few people in charge of many different positions and we constantly
     fail to respond to the needs of the project.
  
   - We need to improve our system services and administration support.
  
  The third category is publicity, fund-raising, and the
  project's image:
  
   - We should setup fund-raising goals, and communicate what we are
     going to be using the funds for.
  
   - We should organize developer get-togethers and presence in major
     conferences.
  
   - We should contact the commercial users of our software and encourage
     them to publicize their use of NetBSD as well as feedback fixes and
     improvements to the code base.
  
   - We should encourage more developers to join our project as well as
     help them during their first steps, without intimidating and
     criticize their work needlessly.
  
  But we need your help to achieve all of that. And this help is not
  limited in the technical areas. We need more people in the project
  management and communications areas where traditionally we have shown
  less focus.
  
  Let's make this year different. Let's make the 3.0 release the best
  one yet and on time. Let's make 2005 the year where YOU are going to
  get more involved and make YOUR forward in the right direction.
  
  Thank you.''

After Christos Zoulas' general overview, each presenter talked about the things their group achieved in the past year.

The overview of the Technical Executive Committee was given by Alistair Crooks:

``The Technical Executive Committee is in charge of four areas: the
  core team, release engineering, security-officer, and pkgsrc. Its
  current members are: Alistair Crooks, Lex Wennmacher, and Luke
  Mewburn. [...]
  
  Over the last year, there have been a number of achievements made by
  the various technical teams which come into the technical executive
  committee's area. I will let the various PMCs talk a bit about what
  has been achieved, any pressing issues or concerns which they have,
  and a bit about how they see the future over the next year. They have
  all worked very hard throughout the year in their own individual areas
  of expertise, and I'd like to commend and thank each team for their
  work.''

The core team presentation was given by Allen Briggs:

``Current core members are the same as last year:
        briggs, christos, fvdl, lukem, matt
  
  Random note:
      * Core works on a rotation basis and attempts to get a majority
        opinion for official rulings. This works pretty well most of the
        time, but can be slow to collect responses from everyone.
      * [...]
  
  Some technical highlights, many since the 2.0 branch:
      * statvfs(2)
      * pf
      * Major ipf updates
      * New ports
      * Many software updates (postfix, bind, groff, etc.)
      * Many manpage improvements
      * Many thread improvements
      * Many audio improvements
      * Many port improvements
      * Version numbering changed with 2.0 release
      * ptyfs
      * PAM coming in now
  
  2.0 goals that we missed:
      * GNATS scrub. We still have a lot of outstanding PRs. Some folks
        have done a great job in cleaning up some old ones, but we really
        need to find a good way to do better as a project. Suggestions
        welcome.
      * Libraries all thread-safe. There has been a pretty good
        improvement here, but there's almost certainly more work to be
        done as was so tactfully pointed out recently on the mailing
        lists.
  
  Core concerns:
      * Outstanding PR list. More than 12% of the PRs in our database
        are still 'open.'  We'd like to see that significantly down by
        next year.
      * Ports with inactive port-masters. There are some ports that have
        been more or less abandoned. These should probably be picked up
        or mothballed. If you love a port, please nurture it.
      * Better organization of project roadmap. We're just getting
        started with a roadmap. It would be nice to extend and subdivide
        it to cover individual ports as well as different kernel and
        userland subsystems. This might be a way to help re-engage some
        port-masters.
      * Testing. It would be nice if we can develop a lab or set of
        volunteers to do some automated or at least regular testing for
        functionality and performance.
      * Long release cycles. The 2.0 release cycle was too long. We'd
        like to find ways to work with releng to help reduce the release
        cycle time in the future.
  
  In addition to trying to address these concerns, we're looking toward
  the future. The roadmap shows a number of things that we'd like to
  see by 3.0, currently scheduled to branch at the end of February -- if
  you've offered to do these things, please try to get them done or 3.0
  will happen without them (I include myself in that admonishment):
  
      * Implementing get*ent_r() and getXbyY_r()
      * Flesh out wedges some more and start taking advantage of them
      * Better ieee1394 support
      * Updated GDB
      * Modular nsswitch
      * Complete PAM integration
      * Better internationalization
      * TCP/SACK
      * EtherIP
      * Merge of the ktrace-lwp branch
      * POSIX shared semaphores
      * XFree86 4.5
  
  Looking further ahead, our roadmap includes:
  
      * NFS4
      * System packages
      * Modular scheduler
      * Updated GCC (4.x branch, if it's stable)
      * Generic device hot-plug
      * Better kernel locking primitives ("newlock")
      * Migration to X.org from XFree86
      * TCP/ECN
      * Better support for modern parallel ports
      * AIO support
  
  Of course, these items and those suggested by Christos earlier are
  only possible with the good work of all of the developers. Thank you
  for your efforts throughout the years. It's a pleasure working with
  you all, and I look forward to seeing what NetBSD can become!''

The security officer presentation was given by Dan Carosone:

``In previous years, Security Officer has provided details of the
  following matters in our presentations. For more detail on these, see
  the AGM logs [...]; today we'll provide a quick update, for those
  entries which are likely to change over time.
  
     * What does the Security Officer team do?
     * Role of Security Officer team
     * Responsiveness
     * Projects
     * Who is Security Officer?
       (dan, david, groo, itojun & perry)
  
  The security-officer role is intended to be primarily a coordination
  and management function, providing a public contact point for NetBSD
  security matters, and marshaling the project's resources, members and
  activities towards various security-related goals.
  
  There are two major aspects to the workload: incident-driven and
  development-driven. This past year has, happily, been a relatively
  quiet year for NetBSD security incidents (less so for issues that
  affect pkgsrc). Unfortunately it's also been somewhat quiet for some
  of our development goals as well. We laid out a number of goals at
  last year's meeting. We've made mixed progress on these during the
  year. For each of these, we'd like to give a self-appraisal and
  summary of progress last year.
  
  Last year's goals
  -----------------
  
        Goal: Continue to improve Binary Patches for Advisories
   Appraisal: A
     Summary: Binary patches issued for most Advisories
              (where applicable).
               * More automation to be done yet.
               * Thanks to Releng for access to autobuilds
  
        Goal: Re-organize Advisory publishing process
               * Make CVS handling cleaner
               * Lessen publication workload on S-O
   Appraisal: B
     Summary: CVS handling now seems to work well.
              Automation of mail-out process helps greatly.
               * Some 'toolchain' and familiarisation issues
                 with updating htdocs (more details below)
  
        Goal: Get >75% of active developers to have PGP keys
               * Helps for sharing confidential information
                 with relevant expert developers
               * Increases security awareness and tool
                 familiarity among developers
               * Increases visibility of NetBSD among security
                 savvy non-developers
   Appraisal: B+
     Summary: 104 developers' PGP keys
              (in localsrc/security/publickeys/developers)
               * Good degree of connectivity in web of trust
               * All new developers will have PGP keys
               * Has been useful in increasing the trust for
                 admin requests (eg, resetting ssh access)
               * Not 75% yet, but getting closer; conferences
                 and drinking events seem to help and more are
                 encouraged :)
  
        Goal: Security-Officer web page updates
               * Help people understand who S-O is, does
   Appraisal: F
     Summary: Web Pages not significantly updated
               * See 'staffing' below
  
        Goal: Improve mail response time, Advisory publishing time
   Appraisal: A-
     Summary: Response to first contact email mostly quite fast
              * Dropped the ball on very few issues - ( 1? )
              * See 'staffing' below
              * Fewer Advisories this year, fortunately
  
        Goal: Improve internal S-O tracking and communication
   Appraisal: B
     Summary: Internal communication has become very good
              No tracking system yet; delayed by a number of
              infrastructure issues; working with admins now
              and hope to start testing a new one shortly
  
        Goal: Split Security-Announce from NetBSD-Announce
   Appraisal: F
     Summary: Security-Announce list created, but not cut-over
              * Remains outstanding
              * Questions about process and user preferences
              * Was a lower priority, given available staff
                time and workload
  
        Goal: Better communication with Releng
   Appraisal: B+
     Summary: Regular exchanges between Releng and S-O via mail
              and chat provided better coordinated response.
              The one thing guaranteed to bring up security
              issues is an imminent release.
  
        Goal: Sign and Publish ssh host keys and PGP keys
   Appraisal: B-
     Summary: key tables were created, and made available via ftp
              * Web pages not updated yet
              * Coordinate with admins to keep host keys updated
  
        Goal: Sign Releases
   Appraisal: A
     Summary: 2.0 release included a signed set of file hashes
              * SHA1 and MD5, signed by s-o key
              * Need to automate creation and maintenance
  
        Goal: Establish and publish "Security Notes"
              (quick 'NetBSD is not affected' announcements)
   Appraisal: A-
     Summary: The Security Note format was used, and well received.
              * Need to update web pages to index them
  
        Goal: Extended team of security volunteers, to help handle
              non-confidential issues, and contribute time to
              handle less critical flaws which are public and
              not yet SA'd and to follow up with CERT and
              provide NetBSD references for older CERT issues
   Appraisal: F
     Summary: We received only one inquiry from a volunteer this
              year offering to help with ongoing S-O work
              * We did solicit help on specific issues from
                specific experts and groups like port-masters
              * We didn't make a general plea to developers
  
  This Year's goals
  -----------------
  
     * New Tracking tools
     * Update web pages
     * Improve updates to host keys files, with admins help
     * Improve, extend Security Notes
     * Extended team of security volunteers
  
  Web Site updates
  ----------------
  
  The www team has been completing the process of converting the NetBSD
  website to XML. Making updates now needs a number of new tools
  installed, and a number of different steps - which have changed as the
  site develops. Overall, this is a hugely positive change, but at
  least some of us have had 'awkward surprises' when trying to update
  the website to publish a new Security Advisory.
  
  Regardless of the internal format, there are considerable updates
  required to the Security/ web page static contents, updating and
  better documenting NetBSD's security presentation to the public.
  Although we hope to be more successful with that work this year,
  please feel free to make your own contributions.
  
  For some time, we've also had a desire to improve the organisation and
  presentation of the more data-driven aspects, such as automated
  indexes linking SA's to affected releases (and, later, syspkgs).
  There are a number of aspects to this we haven't had time to work
  on. In the meantime, the VuXML project has developed a number of
  useful formats and tools we want to look at carefully.
  
  Staffing
  --------
  
  Like other developers, all the security-officer team members have
  non-NetBSD work duties - 'day jobs'. This year, more than previously,
  availability of time has affected S-O. For most of the year, although
  quick incidents and issues were dealt with easily, few were able to
  contribute significant time to 'heavy lifting' incidents or projects.
  
  Therefore it was fortunate that there were fewer issues that affected
  NetBSD itself this past year. Many of the issues notified to
  security-officer were either not relevant to NetBSD, or were problems
  in third-party code that affected pkgsrc. The pkgsrc team did a great
  job in responding to those, and publishing the issues in the
  audit-packages mechanism; they have our sincere thanks.
  
  Security-officer always relies heavily on other NetBSD developers for
  the actual resolution of many issues. Several times this year,
  developers have found an issue in the course of other work, and
  notified security-officer complete with a draft Security
  Advisory. This is wonderful, it makes our job much easier, and greatly
  improves the speed at which we can publish. Thank you, again, and
  please keep it up!
  
  Even so, given other commitments, we can always use more help. There
  are several ways you can help listed below.
  
  What can you do to help S-O?
  ----------------------------
     * If you have the time, contact us about helping with the extended
       team. It will have more relaxed urgency, and will help free up
       S-Os time (and prevent burn out) for handling critical issues.
     * Suggest and perform security sweeps for your pet issues.
     * Review PRs in security category - and close them!
     * Generate example systrace policies for system daemons.
     * Write rc tweaks to run more daemons unpriv'd/chroot/etc.
     * Stomp out more suid programs.
     * Volunteer to join S-O!  Some of us are, or will eventually be,
       looking to retire and make room for new members.''

The release engineering presentation was given by James Chacon:

``Currently, the releng team consists of the following developers (in
  alphabetical order of username):
  
     - agc      Alistair G. Crooks
     - cjs      Curt Sampson
     - cyber    Erik Berls
     - grant    Grant Beattie
     - he       Havard Eidnes
     - itojun   Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino
     - jdc      Julian Coleman
     - jmc      James Chacon
     - jwise    Jim Wise
     - lukem    Luke Mewburn
     - msaitoh  SAITOH Masanobu
     - tron     Matthias Scheler
  
  Before I get started too much into things I'd like to make sure and
  give a public thank you to everyone who worked on the 2.0 release. As
  I'll detail below this was a very long process for us and the team
  deserves many thanks for getting it done.
  
  Now onto the specifics.
  
  Major achievements last year:
  
     - We got 1.6.2 out the door in March. While this was mostly a
       maintenance release it did also address a number of security
       advisories as well as numerous kernel fixes.
     - We finally (after almost 8.5 months) released 2.0 to the
       public. I'll go into more detail below as to what we hope to do in
       the future to prevent these types of delays.
     - We'd like to thank everyone involved in the src/x11 cross-over X11
       build support. I won't try and name people specifically here
       because I know I'll miss folks. The main thing is to highlight
       just how much easier this makes the release engineering process as
       everything that we put into a release directory on ftp.NetBSD.org
       is now able to be done from one source tree.
     - Maintenance continued on both the 1.5 and 1.6 source trees as
       pullups were submitted and processed. (though I will note the
       number of 1.5 submissions has been trickling off for some time).
     - Increased communication with the security-officer team. This has
       been problematic in the past as often times security issues pick
       the worst timing to show up (as we're releasing is often a good
       time it seems..), so keeping our schedules more coordinated is
       helping both teams out here.
     - Better communication with the rest of developers via requested
       semi regular status reports during a release cycle.
  
  Plans for this year:
  
     - Start the release of a security/critical fix branch from each main
       release. As detailed recently to netbsd-developers this sub-branch
       will consist of security/critical fixes only and is expected to
       get us binary release updates that security officer also needs
       when publishing an SA. It's expected that 2.0.1 will release soon
       (as the new autobuild hardware is installed and sysinst support
       for updates is added into the tree).
     - Release 2.1 sometime during spring of 2005
     - The return of regular snapshot builds once the new autobuild
       hardware is in place.
     - Branch 3.0 at the end of February. NOTE: this doesn't mean we plan
       on overlapping 2.1 and 3.0. It's expected that 3.0 won't be ready
       until probably June so at least a month or more will exist between
       these releases.
     - Release 1.6.3 during 2005. It's unclear at this time when a good
       point in time for that will be, but as it may be the final release
       of the 1.6 tree it's release most likely will happen shortly after
       3.0 releases and the 1.6 branch is closed down.
     - De-support/close down the 1.5 branch. There are no pullups
       currently waiting on this branch and an announcement about it's
       status should be going out shortly.
  
  Major hiccups/problems during 2004:
  
     - Obviously to most of us 2.0 took way too long to get into a
       releasable form. There were a large number of factors that led to
       this but the main thing that hamstrung us early on was getting ipf
       into a stable state that was ready for release. While it was
       critical to get onto the ipf 4 code in the future the initial
       branch should be pushed out if a major import like this happens at
       the last minute.
     - As everyone is aware this is a volunteer project so people have
       "real life" to worry about too. What this can mean when we drag a
       release out is conflicts arise with real life vs project
       schedules. So doing anything we can to keep things moving and on
       schedule helps everyone avoid stress :)
     - In addition we lost both releng machines during 2004. The main
       machine we published snapshots and did request tracking on
       (releng) died and during the build cycle for 2.0 it was found that
       the autobuild machine (tgm) was having memory timing issues. As a
       result of this new hardware was purchased and will be installed
       shortly.
  
  Things to improve on we need help with:
  
     - Portmaster involvement. We need the portmasters to be more
       involved with the functioning of their ports. This includes
       testing out the branch in enough time before the release to ensure
       there are no MD issues
     - Testing. More testing and feedback is desirable. Especially the
       case with pullups during the release cycles.
     - Bug fixing. As part of the 2.0 release we tracked a given set of
       PR's highlighted as "critical" to fix before release. Yet, some of
       those would sit for months before getting worked. This puts
       release engineering in a bind as we don't want to release code
       with known critical bugs, but without people stepping up to work
       bugs it makes things drag out for a long long time.
     - More manpower never hurts. Especially as we try and ramp up the
       critical/security branches for release having additional people
       willing to commit the time to coordinate releases will be crucial.''

The pkgsrc presentation was intended to be given by Johnny Lam, but, unfortunately, he couldn't make it. Thomas Klausner gave the presentation for him:

``The pkgsrc PMC is the Project Management Committee which
  oversees the development of pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages
  Collection. The pkgsrc PMC currently consists of Alistair
  Crooks, Thomas Klausner, and Johnny Lam (agc, wiz, jlam).
  
    Progress made in 2004
    =====================
  
  pkgsrc continues to grow in the number of packages supported
  in the tree, and in the number of operating systems to which
  pkgsrc has been ported. Particularly noteworthy progress has
  been made in the following:
  
   * Pkgsrc documentation converted to XML and placed in
     pkgsrc/doc/guide. This replaces the older monolithic
     Packages.txt, and we can now generate pkgsrc documentation
     in different formats, e.g. HTML, PDF, etc. [grant, jschauma,
     hubertf]
  
   * Full switchover to buildlink3 and the removal of all buildlink2
     code from pkgsrc. This makes our infrastructure cleaner
     and eases pkgsrc development. [wiz, snj, minskim, xtraeme,
     and many other developers]
   
   * Wrapper scripts broken out of buildlink3 into a standalone
     framework. This was an important step toward making it
     easier to port pkgsrc to other operating systems and to
     older releases of NetBSD. [jlam]
  
   * Ports of pkgsrc to additional operating systems:
     - Interix (Microsoft Services For UNIX) [tv]
     - DragonFlyBSD [Todd Willey from DragonFlyBSD Project]
  
   * bootstrap-pkgsrc was merged into pkgsrc, which simplifies
     the task of getting pkgsrc running from scratch on any of
     the operating systems supported by pkgsrc.
  
   * A pkgsrc regression suite was added into pkgsrc/regress to
     improve our quality control for commits to pkgsrc. [gavan]
  
   * A build-time options framework has been added to pkgsrc to
     more uniformly describe the optional components that may be
     built into packages. [jlam]
  
   * Better execution of branching process -- we stuck to our
     goals of have well-defined limits to pkgsrc "freeze" periods,
     and we have managed to branch regularly at the end of each
     quarter for the past 4 quarters. [pkgsrc-pmc]
  
  The following items are part of a good trend -- the involvement
  of more pkgsrc developers in helping to maintain pkgsrc instead
  of simply committing new packages. More developers were given the
  freedom to take on new responsibilities:
  
   * Improved management of the pkgsrc-stable branch with the
     establishment of a releng-pkgsrc team. This team uses the
     usual releng tools to manage pullups to the pkgsrc-stable
     branch in a timely manner. [admins, releng-pkgsrc]
  
   * Much more responsive pkg PR handling thanks to a rotating
     team of developers (modeled on www@) that routes incoming
     PRs to other developers most likely to be able to handle
     them. [pkg-bug-handlers]
  
   * Dedicated groups of developers using pkgsrc on non-NetBSD
     platforms handle platform-specific PRs. This helps ensure
     that pkgsrc support for these platforms continues to improve
     over time. [solaris-pkg-people, darwin-pkg-people,
     linux-pkg-people, irix-pkg-people, freebsd-pkg-people,
     interix-pkg-people]
  
   * Continuous bulk building of pkgsrc on several different
     platforms to expose broken packages or broken infrastructure
     in a timely manner. [krister, agc, minskim, jschauma, and
     many others]. Thanks go to wiz for providing diffs of the
     bulk build results.
  
  
    Work in Progress
    ================
  
   * tv-recurse branch has changes to pkgsrc infrastructure make
     calls so that we aren't as reliant on recursive make
     invocations. This will allow for substantial speedups
     when building large numbers of packages. [tv]
  
   * Package views is still considered experimental pending a
     solution to the problem of shared directories across
     packages. Two different ways of solving this problem were
     discussed in November 2004 on the tech-pkg mailing list,
     and both solutions have developers (jmmv, jlam) committed
     to implementing them during the course of 2005.

     
    Other noteworthy items
    ======================
    
   * Thanks go to jmmv and markd for their respective high-quality
     jobs in updating the GNOME-2.x and KDE-3.x packages in pkgsrc
     to the latest versions. These are huge collections of highly
     visible packages, and they have good maintainers.
  
   * Sun has donated hardware for pkgsrc development.
  
   * Sun will be using "some form of pkgsrc" for its contrib
     packages extras in Solaris 10.
  
   * pkgsrcCon 2004, hosted by wiz & dillo at TU Wien, was deemed a
     success. pkgsrc developers and users were able to get
     together and share ideas/concerns/projects over a three-day
     period. pkgsrcCon 2005 will be hosted by salo in Prague on
     May 6-8 to hopefully start a tradition of being a well-spring
     of pkgsrc projects for the coming year.
  
   * DragonFlyBSD has some strong advocates within the project
     for using pkgsrc as its package system instead of FreeBSD
     Ports or rolling their own. This is a tribute to the
     excellent job that pkgsrc developers are doing to produce
     a very good and very usable package system, and an
     acknowledgment of how well we support non-NetBSD systems.
  
    Plans for the future
    ====================
  
   * Continue to work on using cross-compilers to help build
     pkgsrc for slower machines on much faster ones. reinoud
     has posted a solution using distcc to tech-pkg@, and kristerw
     presented interesting work at pkgsrcCon 2004 that will
     hopefully be integrated into pkgsrc in the future.
  
   * Decrease our bulk build times by using clusters to spread
     the load. jlam will be presenting his work on this at
     pkgsrcCon 2005.
  
   * Be more responsive about security problems, perhaps by
     creating a group similar to security-officer for pkgsrc.
  
   * Improve bulk build results on non-i386 architectures. The
     two items above will help this greatly.
  
   * Usual stuff:
     - Create more packages!
     - Maintain your packages!
     - Port to more platforms!
     - Attract more pkgsrc developers!
  
    Where you can help
    ==================
  
   * If you have knowledge of how a particular feature works in
     pkgsrc, or if you add a new feature to pkgsrc, please try
     to write a regression test to test the proper functioning of
     that feature. This will help keep pkgsrc working as expected
     by allowing developers to test that their commits don't fail
     the regression tests.
  
   * Consider joining any of the various teams that help out with
     handling PRs, writing user documentation, or managing the
     pkgsrc-stable branch.
  
   * pkgsrc-wip continues to grow and to attract new
     developers-in-training. It would be very helpful to the
     pkgsrc project if more developers could find time to look
     over requests for package reviews on the pkgsrc-wip mailing
     lists. This helps to spread the knowledge, and to gain more
     people capable of answering pkgsrc developer FAQs for new
     pkgsrc-wip developers and users.''

The report of the Communications Executive committee was given by Tracy Di Marco White:

``The Executive Committee for Communications Members:

     Tracy Di Marco White <gendalia>,
     Hubert Feyrer <hubertf>, vice chair,
     Jan Schaumann <jschauma>,
     Luke Mewburn <lukem>, chair,
     Perry E. Metzger <perry>,
     Jeremy C. Reed <reed>,
     Scott Reynolds <scottr>
  
  Review of the past year:
  
     * A new logo was selected out of over 400 submissions by
       238 artists. IP transfer was handled by Luke, and
       now TNF owns its new logo.
  
     * We've been handling various announcements, coordinating
       with release engineering for the 2.0 release
       announcement, the trademarking for NetBSD, etc.
  
     * Jan has done a marvelous job coordinating the quarterly
       reports, advertising what we're doing so that people
       are made aware of our developments.
  
     * Making sure various news sites such as slashdot,
       daemonnews, osnews are made aware of NetBSD related news
       by submitting news items to them.
  
     * Put together an org chart of the TNF structure.
       http://www.NetBSD.org/Foundation/structure.png
  
     * Hubert worked with the German vendor JF Lehmanns
       (www.lob.de) to have CDs available in Germany and
       Europe.
  
     * Coordinating, helping, and performing presence of the
       NetBSD project at various tradeshows, and advertising
       them on http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/events.html
  
     * Hubert has acted as point of contact for the benchmark
       Gregory McGarry did, measuring performance of FreeBSD
       5.3 and NetBSD 2.0 providing webspace
       (http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/gmcgarry/), and making the
       article public for Gregory.
  
     * Hubert followed up discussion on NetBSD benchmarks by
       posting a list of comparisons of NetBSD to other
       operating systems, and posting the list to
       tech-perform@, see
       http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/tech-perform/2005/01/12/0000.html
  
     * Jeremy has converted the logo into a format cafepress is
       happy with, and a NetBSD t-shirt is available. The
       price will be set to generate funds for TNF.
       http://www.cafepress.com/netbsd
  
  Issues we'd like improvement on:
  
     * Support for active marketing. Hubert wanted to print
       official NetBSD stickers for distribution, but the
       budget wasn't available.
  
     * Better participation and flow of information from
       developers: documenting things properly (src/doc/CHANGES,
       htdocs) so our users can find documentation about things;
  
     * The cafepress free store only allows one item of each
       type. We'd like to be able to have more.
  
  Goals:
  
     * Fundraising Fundraising Fundraising
  
     * Establish ourselves as a point of contact for announcing
       "interesting" things, taking data from developers (see
       "participation and flow of information from developers"
       above) and preparing information to hand over to the
       www@ team, the netbsd-news@ and/or netbsd-announce@ list
       as well as various news sites (slashdot, daemonnews,
       OSnews, ...)
  
     * Hubert has established a personal blog with NetBSD
       related news items that were not achieved by TNF but
       that are still interesting to NetBSD users/fans.
       Advertising these to the NetBSD community and beyond is
       good public relations.
  
     * Several people are starting to do various tradeshows.
       Discuss organization steps to help each other, and as
       comm-exec@ contact t-shirt and CDROM vendors to donate
       items for handing out at these events.
  
     * Calendar with trade shows and events for upcoming 12
       months and find developers or volunteers to begin
       registration and planning for events well in advance.
       (For example, LinuxFest Northwest is coming up in April.)
  
     * Build media contacts list for mainstream media: Dr.
       Dobb's, InfoWorld, Network World, etc. (They have covered
       BSD news a few times each year.)
  
     * Media relations schedule: send out at least one press
       release each month to various mainstream tech media (not
       just small BSD-specific sites).
  
     * Work better with release engineering to know when a
       release is out. Mainstream press needs lead time to be
       able to announce our releases.
  
     * Work with developers to co-write technical articles for
       technical magazines and technical events. Build a list
       of articles that should be done, target (magazine or
       event), and developers to help.
  
     * Continue advertising NetBSD and support people who do so.
  
     * Fundraising Fundraising Fundraising
  
  Thank you, and please consider helping promote NetBSD and
  pkgsrc.''

The www team presentation was given by Jan Schaumann:

``As in previous years, let's start out with who the www-team
  currently is. While there have been the same regular members on and
  off again, at the moment the rotation consists of:
  
   * D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy>
   * Klaus Heinz <heinz>
   * Jan Schaumann <jschauma>
   * Jeremy C. Reed <reed>
   * Simas Mockevicious <symka>
  
  Daniel de Kok <daniel>, who has been a very active and helpful member
  of the rotation, regrettably had to drop out recently due to other
  commitments.
  
  These members take turns in answering the various questions that are
  sent to www@ and perform the regular maintenance work. More formally,
  the duties of the www team are outlined at
  http://www.NetBSD.org/People/groups/#www and
  http://www.NetBSD.org/developers/www.html.
  
  To summarize, we're somewhere in between of ``customer-service'' /
  ``tech-support'' and HTML-monkeys. Aside from that, the www team also
  coordinates with communication-exec and the general developer body to
  prepare official announcements not only on our own website, but on
  other forums as well.
  
  The www team also responds to mail coming in on the mirrors@ address
  and maintains the list of our various volunteer mirrors in
  coordination with the admins team.
  
  So what have we been up to over the last 12 months?  In preparation
  for last year's annual meeting, we had set out a number of goals, and
  while we have tried to work on these goals, we were not able to
  accomplish all of them:
  
   * translation work has stagnated in some areas / languages but also
     improved in others. The Korean and Lithuanian translations
     (maintained by minskim@ and symka@) are currently the most active
     translations efforts.
  
   * news announcements and general advocacy through our website has, I
     believe, improved somewhat, and cooperation with other committees is
     smoother now as well.
  
   * we did *not* manage to get any work done at all on
     projects.NetBSD.org. As was pointed out last year, this server
     contains a large number of completely dormant projects. These
     should be updated.
  
   * developers' public keys have *not* yet been made public on
     the website. This is an item that has completely dropped
     off the radar and we probably should file a PR for this to
     remind us.
  
  So, you may ask, have we done nothing useful at all in 2004?
  
  Well, we did achieve a few things over the last 12 months, and I feel
  that we are still continuously improving:
  
  It is worth noting that the NetBSD guide (basically a project all on
  its own) has been revamped and updated for the 2.0 release. The
  overwhelming majority of the work in this area has been done by Hubert
  Feyrer, who we owe much thanks for this.
  
  We have published the new logo together with communication-exec.
  While this of course lead to a lot of discussion, the process of
  updating the entire website and virtually every single page has shown
  us weaknesses in our infrastructure. At the moment, there are 2244
  HTML files in the htdocs repository. Of these, 299 are generated from
  XML (178 at the time of the publication of the logo) and 396 from
  .list format (via perl). So for any global change, we still need to
  hand-edit 1549 files. Yuck!
  
  This is why we have focused in the last quarter of 2004 on the
  conversion of the existing pages to XML. While this brings its own
  difficulties, it has a number of convincing advantages:
  
    * all pages generated from XML have the same consistent look and feel
    * if the need arises, we can easily change the look and feel of the
      entire website
    * common segments (header, footer, styles etc.) can be controlled in
      one central file, so that a simple 'make' in the root can regenerate
      all files
    * all files are automatically standards compliant
  
  Some of the problems caused by the use of this framework are the large
  number of packages that each developer needs to have installed.
  Another problem is that different versions of the required packages
  produce different output, leading to a number of unnecessary 'regen'
  commits. This has lead to some ``awkward surprises'' and frustration
  among developers who have to touch htdocs occasionally.
  
  We are understanding of this frustration, recognize the shortcoming
  and have started to work on a remedy for this situation: We have
  started to change our point of view of the files under CVS to accept
  that all files that are generated from another source, should be
  treated as ``object files''. This means that they should not really
  remain under CVS control -- instead, developers should just commit the
  source files and be done with it.
  
  I'm currently working on setting up www.NetBSD.org such that it can
  build the htdocs tree itself. This setup is virtually complete and
  currently in a testing phase. Once we're satisfied that everything
  works as planned, we can remove the .html files from CVS. This has
  the advantage that it doesn't matter anymore which version of which
  required package a developer has installed. In fact, developers who
  routinely do not do htdocs work can just commit trivial changes to the
  source files without the need to generate the html files themselves.
  
  The setup on www.NetBSD.org also acts as an implicit error-checker: if
  a commit breaks the generation of the website, it will complain and
  the website will _not_ be updated.
  
  So, to summarize (and reiterate), while we understand the frustration
  with the difficulty of using the XML framework, we hope that the
  developer community understands that in the long run it will make
  things Much Easier. And while we did not achieve many of the
  individual goals set out last year, I nevertheless believe that we
  accomplished _some_thing and had a somewhat successful year.
  
  General goals for the coming year, goals the achievement of which each
  developer is encouraged to contribute to, are:
  
   * remove redundant documentation and eliminate duplication: There are
     many pages that contain similar information. They should be merged
     with other documents, moved into the guide or purged altogether.
  
   * continue to convert files to XML
  
   * revive / continue with translation work: Each developer who is even
     semi-fluent in any languages other than English is strongly
     encouraged to help with this task.
  
   * create a framework to manage ports-pages wrt to new: releases and
     news items: the 2.0 Release pointed out that at the moment there is
     no simple way of updating the largely identical information on ~60
     pages.
  
   * entice port-masters to keep their port-pages up to date: Many of the
     port-pages have not been updated in *years*. Surely there has been
     some progress or some noteworthy achievement, yet the www team can
     not keep track of all the changes in all ports.
  
   * consider a redesign of the main page: The introduction of the new
     logo has lead to some discussion about the general design of the
     main page. While many users like the simplicity of the layout, it
     has become clear that none of us is a web designer. Several users
     (and developers) have made suggestions as to how to improve the
     websites layout, but the danger of (yet another) huge bikeshed
     discussion has inhibited any progress. Which actually is too bad.
  
  And with these suggestions for discussion and goals, I'd like to close
  the presentation of the www-team. I'd like to thank all the members
  on the www team for their hard work and good spirits.''

Lex Wennmacher presented the report from the finance committee:

``The duties of finance-exec are managing the financial business of
  the Foundation. The current members of finance-exec are Christos
  Zoulas (chair), Alistair Crooks (vice chair), Lex Wennmacher
  (treasurer), and Andrew Brown (assistant treasurer).
  
  Our annual expenditure is mainly on servers, disks, and miscellaneous
  hardware, but also on legal fees. Currently all of our expenditures
  have to be balanced by our only income, donations. Since the last
  Annual General Meeting, we received about 65 donations, some were
  quite generous. We acknowledge donations on our web pages, if the
  donor so wishes. The release announcement for 2.0 contained a
  solicitation for donations which was remarkably successful, as we
  noticed a significant donation increase.
  
  This concludes finance-exec's presentation.''

The presentation of membership executive committee was given by Thomas Klausner:

``Membership-exec oversees all aspects of membership in the
  Foundation. The current members of membership-exec are Lex Wennmacher
  (chair), Christos Zoulas (vice chair), Tracy Di Marco White, Thomas
  Klausner, and Ken Hornstein.
  
  The routine work of membership-exec consists of handling and deciding
  on new applications. Since the last Annual General Meeting, we have
  received 17 applications, had 12 new developers, and 2 resignations.
  We lost one developer, Eric Reid, in a tragic accident.
  
  One of the principal duties of membership-exec is keeping the records
  relating to the membership of the Foundation, used for example when
  preparing the list of Active Members for determining who may vote in
  Board Elections. Our bylaws require that developers must have signed
  a Membership Agreement before they can be considered members. 
  
  Another achievement in 2004 was the finalization of an improved
  Membership Agreement - the old version of the agreement didn't
  properly reflect the new structure of the Project and was legally
  problematic in several ways.
  
  For this year we've got the following items on our agenda:
  
     - implementing a developer contact database (containing
       postal addresses and phone numbers)
     - developing a procedure for validating developers when
       they lose their ssh key
     - developing a procedure for resignations
  
  That's all, thanks for reading.''

The presentation of the Executive Committee for Administration and the Project System Administration group was given by Tracy Di Marco White:

``Members:
     Christos Zoulas <christos>, on call, AEC vice chair,
     Tracy Di Marco White <gendalia>, on call, AEC chair,
     Bill Squier <groo>,
     Jan Schaumann <jschauma>,
     Phil Nelson <phil>, www synchronisation,
     Scott Reynolds <scottr>, AEC,
     Jonathan Perkin <sketch>, on call
     Noriyuki Soda <soda>, on call
     Soren S. Jorvang <soren>, on call
     S.P.Zeidler <spz>, on call
     Jason Thorpe <thorpej>,
     Thor Lancelot Simon <tls>
  
  New hardware:
  
     * A new backup server locate at Ludd, University of Lulea, Sweden,
       maintained by Anders Magnusson has been set up, and Thor has
       just started doing backups of everything we can fit onto it.
  
     * New http, console, mail, and one xen box that is used for
       administering the other Project servers. Thor built the system
       disks, and Erik Berls & Eric Volpe assisted in the installation
       of our new machines, as well as help from Peter Losher of ISC.
  
     * Two new build boxes were put together by Thor, and are currently
       on their way to California for Jason to install.
  
     * Sun has donated two machines for use in doing Solaris pkgsrc bulk
       builds, hosted at Stevens Institute of Technology, where Jan
       Schaumann maintains them.
  
  Hardware failures:
  
  This has been a bad year for us, at least regarding our hardware.
  We'd like to thank everyone for their patience during our outages.
  
     * The drives failed on the new http machine shortly after it went
       into service, causing me to do a fairly quick rebuild onto the new
       mail server hardware. Not long after that, the drives in the NEW
       new http server also showed some errors. Thor ordered new raptor
       SATA drives to replace these drives, and Jason put them into
       service. With the new drives in place, we should be able to move
       the mail server to the new hardware in the near future. While
       www.NetBSD.org was unavailable, Manuel Bouyer made
       www.fr.NetBSD.org available to answer www.NetBSD.org. Soda
       recovered mail lost because mail-index was unavailable, and Soren
       refed everything into mail-index.
  
     * The release engineering tender machine (releng) had a power supply
       / motherboard failure. Todd Whitesel picked up the machine to
       investigate the problems and how to repair it, but was unable to
       make it boot. I moved the release engineering ticket tracking
       service (req) to www.NetBSD.org, with help from Jim Wise, after
       Erik Berls mounted the hard drives and put the data up for me to
       use to reinstall it.
  
     * The release engineering build machine failed to successfully build
       various 2.0 builds due to various hardware failures. We were
       unable to use it for the 2.0 release sets.
  
     * The ftp server's raid controller failed multiple drives, causing
       Thor & I several days of pain while we backed up what we could and
       rebuilt and reinstalled it. Peter Losher and Eric Volpe were
       immense help juggling disks and installing new disks. The
       multiple disks failures were traced to a bug in the raid
       controller firmware. Many people were involved in this, if I've
       forgotten anyone I apologize.
  
     * The ftp server suffered from some frequent crashes that were
       traced to memory errors, solved by reseating the memory, and
       upgrading the bios.
  
     * The cvs server failed a disk, but after testing we determined the
       disk was actually ok. The machine was able to rebuild onto a hot
       spare for the duration.
  
     * The anoncvs server suffered a raid controller failure that
       manifested as single bit errors occurring frequently in our
       publically available source trees. After significant
       investigation, we traced this to the raid controller, and Thor
       provided a replacement raid controller. Petra, our newest admin,
       had this fail in her first on call shift, and worked quickly to
       make available update from the ftp server that are normally only
       available from the anoncvs server.
  
  For all of our hardware failures, Peter Losher of ISC provided
  invaluable help, swapping hardware and escorting our helpers
  in to do hands on work.
  
  Changes:
  
     * We have simplified and corrected the trust relationships between
       the Project servers. [...]
  
     * We have begun to migrate towards a standard hardware and software
       package for Project servers, replacing many old 4U machines with
       non-redundant disks and random old versions of NetBSD with modern
       1/2U servers running 2.0. We have decreased our rack usage by
       more than 10U. Thor has done the majority of the design work
       involved, and Jonathan has started working on a system to ease
       package rebuilds for all of our Project servers.
  
     * We have established an on-call system for handling day to day
       admin tasks, and added new admins to the on call rotation. We are
       working to make sure issues brought to our attention don't fall
       through the cracks.
  
     * Soren Jorvang performed our migration from qmail to postfix, with
       some help from scripts Christoph Badura wrote after studying our
       qmail/majordomo configuration.
  
     * Soren also performed the migration from gnats3 to gnats4, and in
       the process also moved gnats from the mail server to the web
       server, allowing real time access to the gnats database from the
       web.
  
     * I implemented greylisting (light) with blacklisting under qmail
       this year. This caused some delay, but was widely appreciated
       given the amount of spam everyone was receiving through our mail
       host. On moving to postfix, Soren implemented greylisting using
       gld, which has caused much more comment, but has done an even
       better job of making our mailing list owners lives reasonable.
       We're currently testing a lighter version of gld.
  
  News:
  
     * We've established our own contract with 200 Paul
       (www.e200paul.com), so we can have our own contact able to
       physically work with the ISC hosted systems without being escorted
       by someone from ISC. Jason Thorpe has agreed to be our hands, and
       we deeply appreciate his ongoing help in resolving a problematic
       access situation that has persisted for years. This also allows
       us to directly ship hardware to 200 Paul.
  
     * ISC provided us with a /27 network after we ran out of room in the
       /28 we were previously using.
  
  Upcoming:
  
     * We will be implementing RT for use for security officer and for
       admin tasks. We are currently discussing the best way to do this.
  
     * Soren is looking into upgrading the mailing lists from majordomo
       to majordomo2.
  
     * Soren is also investigating moving mail-index from home grown
       scripts to mhonarc to facilitate easier access to the mailing list
       archives.
  
  Goals:
  
     * No broken machines!
  
     * Complete development and deployment of new backup system for all
       TNF hosts.
  
     * No broken machines!
  
     * Build on ongoing standardization of hardware and software
       configurations by deploying centralized configuration management.
  
     * No broken machines!
  
  Thank you for your patience through all our changes.''

After all the reports, Christos Zoulas thanked all the presenters for the interesting information and insight into the various project groups. If you are interested in participating in ongoing discussion, please join our mailing lists and see our web site for more information about the NetBSD project, http://www.NetBSD.org/.

-- Hubert Feyrer <hubertf@NetBSD.org>, 2nd Chair of the Communications Executive Committee, The NetBSD Foundation