[Tinyos-devel] Introducing Apache Labs

[Philip Levis]

On Nov 26, 2006, at 6:17 PM, Joe Polastre wrote:

> Very cool.  I think TinyOS would benefit from a similar structure
> where "community is more important than code."  In TinyOS-land, this
> means that any school or company that has commit access could request
> a lab, and the lab can work on whatever it wants so long as a lazy
> consensus is reached to create the lab.
>
> Now, if only we had a *real* TinyOS server, we could actually do great
> things like this.   There are a gazillion great random TinyOS project
> ideas with nowhere to live, this encourages the community to share
> these ideas openly.

This sounds like contrib, except that it requires a vote. Also,  
unlike contrib, the Apache approach is for people who already have  
commit privileges.

Contrib for 2.0 is going to take a slightly different approach than  
1.x. It's still just as open, but Martin Leopold and Kevin Klues have  
volunteered to be the caretakers. The caretakers maintain an index of  
what is in contrib, periodically monitor the current state of  
projects (supported or not, etc.), and have a few guidelines for  
contrib projects (e.g., a project needs a top-level HTML file  
describing how to use it, a recommended directory structure). The  
idea is that with a bit of caretaking, the contents of tinyos-2.x- 
contrib could be much easier to use, thereby benefitting both the  
users and producers of the technology. Kevin and Martin are still  
hashing out the final details, and should be putting up a web page  
and sending out an announcement soon.

Phil