Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 06:07:58 -0600
From: Alan Robertson <alanr@bell-labs.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: HA notes

Thanks guys, for the nice HA coverage this week!

Depending on what day you asked me, I expect to see heartbeat in the RH 6.1 or
not.  I've fixed the FHS compliance issues (I think).  This and other things I
expect to put into 0.4.3 are shown on the task (TODO) list.

For a day or so, I was pretty pessimistic about the possibility of heartbeat
winding up in RH 6.1 for real (they had some problems -- many of them FHS
related).  On the other hand, I didn't know that they were going to try and put
it into 6.1 until just before I heard the complaints.  Right now, I'm going to
try and make the 0.4.3 release correspond to whatever I can get in and trust
before 6.1 needs it.

In timing that I can only credit to God (since I'm clearly not smart enough to
arrange it), I had already decided to fix the FHS problems just a few hours
before the reports of RH's problems came in.  So, I could legitimately say that
I was planning on fixing it (after all, it was already up on the web site).

For some reason, this kind of thing has happened quite a bit to me over the
years.  It's a real blessing, and it makes me look a lot smarter than I am :-)

Other things not mentioned on the list are a significant push to get heartbeat
working smoothly on Debian (in addition to Red Hat and SuSE).

We're beginning to pick up people who are planning on becoming Real Users very
soon.  One of them wrote lots of the documentation, and I CC him on lots of
problem email, so he knows as much about the state of it as anyone but me, and
he's going to install it on some production servers in spite of that :-)

Several people are beginning to put using it into concrete plans.  One or two
have clients they've committed to deploy it with (but fortunately not quite
yet).

Scary thoughts <:-O

One thing you could highlight for me is the growing structure of the effort.  We
now pretty much have a goal and a plan (the task list), and can actually put a
certain number of additional good people to work doing interesting and useful
things.  That's how Mitja got the authentication job -- he responded about an
hour after I announced the task list.  By the way, he got a little of it working
before he went on vacation.  So, things are really getting exciting!  I really
hope we can somehow squeeze Mitja's stuff in before 6.1 ships.  Of course,
there's no guarantee that RH will ship it with 6.1 anyway.  But, it's a good
thing to shoot for anyway!

Too bad you guys couldn't make it to my HA talk tonight.  It went well.  I had
fun, and I think the audience did, too.

Please feel free to excerpt anything useful from this mail as you might find
useful.

And, as always...

	Thanks for your publication!

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr@bell-labs.com