Minutes from face to face meeting @ FU Berlin on June 03, 2014

=========== Milestones for next Release

Legend:

• ?? indicates "more info or discussion needed" for that item
• ++ indicates "need more manpower" for this item
• no symbol indicates that it is planned for the release

The next release should mainly focus on finishing and stabilizing on-going work.

As a tentative date we are aiming for mid-October, but that should be concreted during the process.

Network Stack

• 6LoWPAN
  • fix ND (Martine from FUB will work on this)
  • fix and enhance the border router by adding a flexible multi-interface support, instead of the current specialized serial port stdio solution, and add support for traditional network interface like Ethernet or Wifi (Martine will take the lead on this)
• Routing
  • RPL restructuring (Martin (HAW) + Fabian (FUB))
  • implement RPL non-storing mode (Fabian (FUB) will work on this)
  • finish work on AODVv2 (Lotte from HAW)
  • finish work on OLSRv2 (Benjamin (FUB) - additional input required) ??
• Network restructuring finish up
  • focus on splitting TCP and UDP. (Oleg (INRIA) and Cenk (FUB)) ??
    -> Working TCP is not that far away (hton problems are currently fixed, logic is there, no rewrite needed)
  • decoupling IPv6 and 6LoWPAN, ICMP (Martine (FUB)) ??
• design a generic link layer interface for radio drivers (Kevin (INRIA), Martine and Thomas (FUB))
• Application layer
  • HTTP: at least GET and POST, PUT, DELETE (for MQTT interoperability) ++
    alternatives: ** port minimalistic C implementation (libwww?) ** implement from scratch (Hauke (FUB) and Christian (Airfy))
  • JSON: (for MQTT interoperability) ++ ** port minimalistic C implementation ** implement from scratch (Hauke (FUB))

Hardware Support

• complete support for boards from each main ARM vendor:
  • Freescale
  • STM
  • Atmel

But it won't be possible to have full support for all these boards for next release. The priority is on:

• STM-F4 (SPI + power management missing) (Hauke and Thomas (FUB))
• IoT-LAB (Ala (INRIA) and Thomas (FUB))
• Arduino (SPI + power management) (Hauke (FUB))

Radio drivers:

• XBee shield driver (?) ++
• nRF24I01 driver (Peter (HAW))

Core Improvement

• IPC improvement (Kaspar (kaspar)) ??
• Discussion about assertions in the kernel to prevent system crashing on API misuse -> making this optional via DEVELHELP macro and null pointer checks.

Legal Issues

• Make it easier for vendors to cut out the closed-source binary from the final binary, and MD5 hash compare the rest of the RIOT binary with the open source LGPLv2 RIOT binary to prove they are legally correct. (need to indicate precisely which tool chain, compiler etc.) On-going work by FUB student working group on dynamic linking could help here. ++
• The boiler plate needs some modification: needs to indicate LGPLv2.1 (not just LGPLv2). Boiler plate harmonization. Take standard FSF 10 lines
  boiler plate (with or without "or newer"? Take that part of the discussion to the list.)

Old PRs & Old Issues

• In order to reduce the number of issues and PRs, the community should start with oldest issues and PRs. Close them of fix them, and move up the time scale. Current status: oldest PRs are less than 6 months old. And there are about 5 of them that are several months old. There are older, lingering issues though.

=========== Where do we go from here?

More long-term goals were identified in:

• Better C++ support

• Two PRs from HAW and Vietnam exist to mix C and C++ coding in RIOT.
• Linker and make changes to assign compiler gcc or g++
• allows basic object-oriented programming (but no fancy stuff for now)
• longer term goal is support for standard C++ libraries.
• (Martin from HAW takes the lead on this and will ACK merge existing PRs etc.)

• Threadmanager ??

• only started the discussion on this topic. Need more discussion. Take to the list.