On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 09:37:36AM -0700, Daniel Ng wrote:
> I am interested in helping with the development of
> Coda. How would I get involved? Who would I ask?

Posting to this list, or codalist_at_coda.cs.cmu.edu.

The most important thing is probably, getting the bugs out. My strategy
is often,

1- Use Coda, find something that seems to be a problem.
   (or look at reported problems http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/rt2/)

2- Find a way to easily reproduce the problem.

3- Figure out why this problem occurs. This is often the hardest part,
   because it could be kernel, userspace, or a server problem. Or even
   worse a specific interaction between any of these.

   Try conceptualize what really was intended to happen. For this I
   often fall back on the theses written by the students that worked on
   Coda. The underlying concepts and ideas are typically good. But
   manual pages, or looking what AFS2 or other network filesystems are
   doing is also helpful.

   Steps 2 and 3 typically go hand in hand, in some cases it is hard to
   get a reproducible test without knowing what goes wrong, but if you
   already knew what was wrong reproducing the bug wouldn't be necessary.

4- Report the problem and the testcase to codadev or codalist and
   possibly your reasoning why it is going wrong, at this point probably
   90% of the real hard work is done.

5- Based on the feedback from codadev/codalist, you can try to write a
   patch that fixes the problem. If the solution was trivial you
   probably already knew exactly what to change and you can just include
   the fix it along with the problem report. In some cases the problem
   might really be somewhere else, and you are chasing down just a
   symptom in which case the feedback from others would be useful.

Alternatively, you could just have a crazy/wonderful idea. Implement it,
get other people excited and it might just end up in the main tree :)

- Secure RPC2
- Rsync based file transfers
- Storing files that are not in use compressed in the Coda client cache.
- RPC2 over SCTP/TCP instead of UDP
- Develop simple programs/scripts that can reliably merge conflicting
  versions of mailboxes, cvs archives, databases, netscape/mozilla
  bookmarks files, calender files.
  We could then use these for automated file conflict resolution (ASR's).
- ...

Jan