Minutes from face to face meeting @ FU Berlin on August 29, 2013

Minutes from the Face-to-Face developer meeting @ FU Berlin on August 29, 2013

Participants: Oleg Hahm, Christian Mehlis, Ludwig Ortmann, Emmanuel Baccelli, Kaspar Schleiser, Thomas Eichinger, Martin Lenders Minute taker: Kaspar

1. Branching ============ The question was raised if the master branch should be continued as the main development branch or - as originally intended - contain always a stable version of RIOT without any API changes.

In order to keep it simple, it was decided to use the master branch as the main development branch and create branches for the releases.

2. Fix-up releases ================== The branch for a release will introduce a feature freeze in this branch. After a testing period the HEAD of this branch will be tagged as the release. Fixing commits can still go into this branch and might get tagged as a fix-up release. Further feature development continues in the master branch as usual.

3. Merging repositories ======================== There was a consensus on merging all three existing repositories (RIOT, boards, and projects) into one RIOT repository. The content of the current projects repository will be split up into two folders: examples/ and tests/.

Additionally, there's going to be a repository for applications, containing bigger demo applications. This might also help to ease the distinction of licenses.

Own code from the thirdparty_* repositories will also be merged into the RIOT repository, leaving only differently licensed stuff there (or outsource this to thirdparty vendors' repositories).

4. Features for the upcoming release ==================================== Milestone

---

Features and changes for the next release were collected in the Milestone in the Github Issue Tracker [1] and the corresponding Trello board [2]: Software Features:

• new hardware timer abstraction module
• POSIX timer API
• POSIX socket wrapper and file descriptors
• CCN
• Integration of libCOAP
• framework for automatic testing/continuous integration Hardware support:
• Support for Econotag (almost finished)
• Support for TelosB (almost finished) - may serve as a 16-bit reference platform
• Support for the new reference hardware (e.g., deRFsam3 [3])
• preliminary support Cortex A9 Fixes:
• refactoring of the network stack
• fixing open 6LoWPAN issues

Driving high level perspective

On a macro perspective the participants agreed that the next release should mainly focus on two objectives:

• find and support a cheap available hardware platform (see https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/wiki/Future-Hardware-Platforms)
• add the most important POSIX features to ease porting of existing (non-RIOT) code

Kaspar and Oleg agreed that using the POSIX layer should not be used for core stuff because of added overhead.

Timer Issues

Regarding the broken vtimer, it was decided to redesign an abstracted version of hwtimers (just multiplexing it) and move it to the core module. This would enable things like timeout for IPC message reception and select(). A more powerful timer API should be realized as a RTC module according to the POSIX time API [4]. This module must available for all supported platforms. However, the implementation could partly rely on RTC hardware if available.

General improvements

The documentation must be updated and the doxygen configuration must be fixed. All modules should be properly documented and the documentation should include some examples. As a side note it was agreed that working code shall not include any TODOs.

[1] https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/issues?milestone=5

[2] https://trello.com/b/ROgsipto

[3] https://shop.dresden-elektronik.de/funkmodule/funkmodule-2-4-ghz/minimodul-sam3-23t02-2.html

[4] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/sys/time.h.html