appl/{bsd,ftp,telnet} unbundling plan

[ghudson@MIT.EDU]

With the release of 1.7 out the door, the window reopens to look into
structural changes to the trunk.  One of our long-standing wishlist
items has been the unbundling of appl/bsd, appl/ftp, and appl/telnet,
for several reasons which I won't reiterate.

Russ Allbery has volunteered to put a minimal amount of time into
maintaining appl/bsd.  Ken Hornstein has indicated an interest in
telnet and FTP, although I'm not sure how much of a time commitment.
Both already have MIT accounts and thus can be given access to our
infrastructure.  It doesn't appear that anyone is interested in
putting in the time to be a primary maintainer of any of the three
pieces of code (e.g. adding new features, improving its portability by
using PAM instead of login.krb5, etc.).  My sense is that we (MIT) are
willing to put in some one-time effort to get the code out of our main
tree, but are not interested in raising our long-term commitment level
to it beyond "the minimum necessary".

Here is what I would like to do:

  1. I will get a krb5-appl Subversion repository created using the
     same infrastructure used for the krb5 repository, with the same
     access list as the krb5 repository.

  2. I will do the work to import the appl/{bsd,ftp,telnet} trunk
     version control history into krb5-appl (this is pretty easy with
     svndumpfilter).

  3. I will do the work to make the build system for
     appl/{bsd,ftp,telnet} standalone and create basic documentation
     for building and installing them.

  4. We already have a krb5-appl queue in RT, although I'm not sure
     all appl bug reports are in there.  I will leave any desired
     cleanup in that department to Tom.

  5. I will package up a 1.0 release to be hosted at
     <http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dist/>.

  6. The expectation is that further releases will happen on an
     as-needed basis only (which may mean years between releases) and
     will have 1.0.x version numbers.  We are, of course, open to
     other people moving the applications forward in more meaningful
     ways as long as it doesn't increase our periodic resource
     commitment, but we currently don't expect that to happen based on
     the feedback received to date.

  7. If I have completed up through step 5 before we are ramping up
     for 1.8, we will remove src/appl/{bsd,ftp,telnet} from the trunk
     and they will not be part of the 1.8 release.  If I am
     sidetracked and have not completed the work by then, then we will
     continue on as we are and this will get raised again in another
     1-3 years as usual.

Comments appreciated.  Previous threads on this issue, for reference:
  http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/krbdev/2002-July/000518.html
  http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/krbdev/2002-July/000538.html
  http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/krbdev/2005-July/003538.html
  http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/krbdev/2006-August/004889.html
  http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/krbdev/2007-November/006331.html
  http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/krbdev/2008-September/006895.html