[lm-sensors] project status and future

[r.marek@sh.cvut.cz (Rudolf Marek)]

Hello all,

In this holiday time most of us is resting and maybe thinking about the future plans
for a new year. Maybe you want to do something for other people, to help, to support,
simply to create something that will help other people. Well as you will read further
here is your chance ;)

Executive summary is bellow the article ;)

I would like to write here few notes and visions about lm-sensors project. Let me begin
with current state. The project is managed by Jean Delvare, who also maintains the kernel
part of the project. He is doing his job very well and I would like to thank him very much for this effort.

He always tries hard to go through every single byte of C source and find out if code will work in all cases as
expected. Well this review work is very hard and takes a lot of time in magintude of hours just to review
single patch. He also manages the stack of patches that he accepted and  pushes them to kernel. Of course
he must keep everything in sync. As the project leader he must resolve all issues that are in question,
architectural and implemntation specific. This also takes some time to think out.

He is doing his work very well but he is quite overloaded, so please dont blame him for not reviewing your work
for some time or dont expect that you will receive polite answer to some obvious question. He is only a human
and after 8 hours in regular job is quite difficult not to be tired. You might thing there is a weekend too.
Well there is but even developers want to have a social life :), and rememeber there should be some time
that is devoted to actual coding and thoughts about the future plans. This all is hard to do when you dont
have time, because you must solve all other issues - but  not for different project but for this project.

This was just a first part, the patches. We have also different work. We call them "support questions". Maybe
this is why you are on the list. You came with question but you left yourself subscribed.

Handling the user questions is mainly my "job" I'm trying to help them as much I can, sometimes I win, sometimes
not. We have also a support system on our pages but it is quite unfonfortable for our needs. The answers are written
by me or Jean, and it takes tenth of minutes to reply single one.

Time is my enemy too. I'm finishing university -> master thesis, have already part time jobs... So I cant spend
so much time for this project as I want. Things will go better like round end of February but I'm having hard time now.
I had to stop my theora optimization work because I simply dont have more free time left.

Well this is the end of "active" team. We have some hidden staff, that helps us run the list and website.
I would like to thank Philip Edelbrock and Axel Thimm (iirc) for their efforts.

We have here also past developers of the project and they do help when
they can, but as we all are busy with other stuff and by defintion of past developers lm-sensors is now not
their main project. I would like to thank them for a help too, most notably to Mark Hoffman and Mark Studebaker.

And then we have you and next like 150 of others on the list. Well I know that some of you is trying to help, when
it comes to some work you preiously did. Yeah it is good, but as you can see it is simply not enough.

We have some visions and plans for a future but we cant turn them into reality because we are burried with "must do"
work then will never ever stop to come.

We need your help with our work so we can go for future!

And the future plans that are PITA for now:

1) new support system, - (it died previously and never has been finished)
2) new userspace library - new config file system and all stuff around.
3) wiki like pages, so other people can contribute to sensors know-how -> it should "concentrate" our wisdom
   and wisdom from mailing list.
Pi) configuration file repository - this can hide in wiki as first step.
4) patches that were not included in mainline simply because Jean did not have time to handle them :(
5) and many others ...(multiplexed bus handling, driver cleanup, decode-dimms update... etc etc)
(hope I did not forget something)


Well thats it. If you have some free time and willing to help with someting mentioned here, please reply to
this mail and we can discuss further. I also would like to hear what you wish to change and how we should
change...

Executive summary:

Please join us and help to maintain/create even better project!

We need help with:
1) with this new projects
2) with the support
3) With the reviews

Thank you all for staying with us on ML.

Regards
Rudolf

PS: sorry for the long email and my english, this was written just with one and half pass and it came directly from
my mind.