Interested in contributing

Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

Hey Folks:

I've just recently discovered the existence of this project, and am excited by its prospects.  I hopefully have relevant experience to help with the effort, as I've spent the last four years working on a network distributed storage solution[1].  I'm reading everything that's available at http://hail.wiki.kernel.org/, and would be interested in your feedback on where I might begin to help?

I see a standing request for a FUSE interface to CLD on the wiki; since I've written a number of FUSE-based file systems, would this be desirable?

Thanks very much for any input.

John Quigley
jquigley.com

[1] In the form of the open source Cleversafe project, http://www.cleversafe.org/

Re: Interested in contributing

[Pete Zaitcev]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:13:49 -0500, John Quigley <jquigley@jquigley.com> wrote:

>  I'm reading everything that's available at http://hail.wiki.kernel.org/,
> and would be interested in your feedback on where I might begin to help?

That's a tough question. Although, maybe it's not all 100% relevant.
For example, I set out a goal for myself to created a distributed S3
service using Hail facilities (registering with CLD and using Chunk
back-end). While on course to that, I think I contributed more patches
for CLD than for Tabled. You just need something to keep you interested.

> I see a standing request for a FUSE interface to CLD on the wiki;
> since I've written a number of FUSE-based file systems, would this
> be desirable?

I think so, yes. In the process, if you could create a library for
CLD that were friendly to multi-threaded applications, it would
be godly. The hail/tabled/server/cldu.c is just awful IMHO.
But of course, who cares about libraries. You need a more interesting
goal that coincidentially requires a better library.

> [1] In the form of the open source Cleversafe project, http://www.cleversafe.org/

Cleversafe reminds me about something: it would be great if someone
created some kind of background remote sync for tabled. The redundancy
I'm thinking about is limited to a data center. I don't want to keep
performance hostage to the outside links, but obviously a single
data center is vulnerable to disasters like fire. Note that I don't
have even such limited redundancy at present, so maybe it's early.

-- Pete

Re: Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> While on course to that, I think I contributed more patches
> for CLD than for Tabled. You just need something to keep you interested.

Fair advice ...

> I think so, yes. In the process, if you could create a library for
> CLD that were friendly to multi-threaded applications, it would
> be godly. The hail/tabled/server/cldu.c is just awful IMHO.
> But of course, who cares about libraries. You need a more interesting
> goal that coincidentially requires a better library.

and a fair request, duly noted.  That's sufficiently concrete and tractable to get me engaged.

> Cleversafe reminds me about something: it would be great if someone
> created some kind of background remote sync for tabled. The redundancy
> I'm thinking about is limited to a data center.

Acknowledged, and this would be something I'd be interested in providing.  I'm just beginning to analyze the code, beginning with CLD.  As I progress into tabled, I'll take this request into consideration and email out design/spec thoughts that may come to mind.

Thanks so much for the quick response.

- John Quigley

Re: Interested in contributing

[Jeff Garzik]

On 08/25/2009 09:13 PM, John Quigley wrote:
> Hey Folks:
>
> I've just recently discovered the existence of this project, and am
> excited by its prospects. I hopefully have relevant experience to help
> with the effort, as I've spent the last four years working on a network
> distributed storage solution[1]. I'm reading everything that's available
> at http://hail.wiki.kernel.org/, and would be interested in your
> feedback on where I might begin to help?
>
> I see a standing request for a FUSE interface to CLD on the wiki; since
> I've written a number of FUSE-based file systems, would this be desirable?

Pete gave some excellent pointers for starting out.  The only other, 
minor detail I would add is to practice building from the git 
repository.  These projects are definitely in the "heavy development" 
phase, and problems with release tarballs may have already been fixed in 
the git repo by the time someone gets around to reporting the bug.

Welcome aboard!

	Jeff

Re: Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> The only other, minor detail I would add is to practice building from
> the git repository.  These projects are definitely in the "heavy
> development" phase, and problems with release tarballs may have
> already been fixed in the git repo by the time someone gets around to
> reporting the bug.

I'm doing all of my work, include build/test from your git repos; I'm 
also building on Debian (testing), which I gather differs from your 
folks' development environments (RH-based?).

I have some (simple) libtool patches to your build system that allow for 
Debian-based builds, given the more recent libtool packages.  I assume 
you'd want any and all such patches?

- John Quigley

Re: Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

John Quigley wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> The only other, minor detail I would add is to practice building from
>> the git repository.  These projects are definitely in the "heavy
>> development" phase, and problems with release tarballs may have
>> already been fixed in the git repo by the time someone gets around to
>> reporting the bug.
> 
> I'm doing all of my work, include build/test from your git repos; I'm 
> also building on Debian (testing), which I gather differs from your 
> folks' development environments (RH-based?).
> 
> I have some (simple) libtool patches to your build system that allow for 
> Debian-based builds, given the more recent libtool packages.  I assume 
> you'd want any and all such patches?

For that matter, what is your development environment?  I should 
probably try to duplicate that on my end (if only in a vm) for testing 
purposes.

I'm also going to try documenting some of these environment- and 
build-related matters on the wiki.

- John Quigley

Re: Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

Also, I'll toss this question tonight's pile of random questions: any 
ideas as to why the git RSS feeds for the CLD repo haven't updated since 
June?

http://git.kernel.org/?p=daemon/cld/cld.git;a=rss

I love using feeds in my mail reader to stay abreast of commit activity, 
so if there's any chance of fixing this, that would be tremendous.

- John Quigley

Re: Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

John Quigley wrote:
> Also, I'll toss this question tonight's pile of random questions: any 
> ideas as to why the git RSS feeds for the CLD repo haven't updated since 
> June?
> 
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=daemon/cld/cld.git;a=rss
> 
> I love using feeds in my mail reader to stay abreast of commit activity, 
> so if there's any chance of fixing this, that would be tremendous.

On closer inspection, this doesn't appear to be an isolated problem - 
all git.kernel.org repos suffer from the same issue.  I'll email the 
webmaster, unless you've heard of this as an issue before (I doubt I'm 
the only one to have noticed this)?

Sorry for the off-topic nature of this.

- John Quigley

Re: Interested in contributing

[Jeff Garzik]

On 09/18/2009 12:49 AM, John Quigley wrote:
> Also, I'll toss this question tonight's pile of random questions: any
> ideas as to why the git RSS feeds for the CLD repo haven't updated since
> June?
>
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=daemon/cld/cld.git;a=rss
>
> I love using feeds in my mail reader to stay abreast of commit activity,
> so if there's any chance of fixing this, that would be tremendous.

As of 7AM eastern time, Sep 18, it appears to be up-to-date.

Looks like it got fixed?

	Jeff

Re: Interested in contributing

[John Quigley]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> On 09/18/2009 12:49 AM, John Quigley wrote:
>> Also, I'll toss this question tonight's pile of random questions: any
>> ideas as to why the git RSS feeds for the CLD repo haven't updated since
>> June?
>>
>> http://git.kernel.org/?p=daemon/cld/cld.git;a=rss
>>
>> I love using feeds in my mail reader to stay abreast of commit activity,
>> so if there's any chance of fixing this, that would be tremendous.
> 
> As of 7AM eastern time, Sep 18, it appears to be up-to-date.
> 
> Looks like it got fixed?

You're right, it's correctly updating now.

- John Quigley

Re: Interested in contributing

[Jeff Garzik]

On 09/18/2009 12:34 AM, John Quigley wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> The only other, minor detail I would add is to practice building from
>> the git repository. These projects are definitely in the "heavy
>> development" phase, and problems with release tarballs may have
>> already been fixed in the git repo by the time someone gets around to
>> reporting the bug.
>
> I'm doing all of my work, include build/test from your git repos; I'm
> also building on Debian (testing), which I gather differs from your
> folks' development environments (RH-based?).

Pete and I are Fedora-based.  I also test sporadically on FreeBSD 7 and 
OpenSolaris.


> I have some (simple) libtool patches to your build system that allow for
> Debian-based builds, given the more recent libtool packages. I assume
> you'd want any and all such patches?

Yes, please.

	Jeff

Re: Interested in contributing

[Pete Zaitcev]

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:21:31 -0400, Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote:

> > I'm doing all of my work, include build/test from your git repos; I'm
> > also building on Debian (testing), which I gather differs from your
> > folks' development environments (RH-based?).
> 
> Pete and I are Fedora-based.  I also test sporadically on FreeBSD 7 and 
> OpenSolaris.

I keep thinking about adding diversity into my home lab, but even
if I did, it would be half-hearted. If your primary platform is
different, it's fine, actually helps me not to think about it.

-- Pete