Whimsy board report input - February 2016

[Sam Ruby <ru...@intertwingly.net>]

Items that may be worth including in the board report...

1) GitHub experiment appears to have stalled.  In particular, adding a 
new committer (e.g. Brett) still involves manual intervention by the 
infrastructure team; and there still isn't an Apache hosted clone of 
Whimsy.  None of this is affecting whimsy development, but is the reason 
for monthly board reports.

2) Brett and Craig have succeeded pushing changes to GitHub.  Changes 
continue to be automatically deployed, without human intervention[2]

3) Primarily due to the deadlock and authentication problems experienced 
with the board agenda tool, that tool has been moved over to 
whimsy-test.  It's internal threading model has been converted to 
processes, and LDAP failover and cache expiration logic has been added. 
  Sebb has been instrumental in this effort.  This may ultimately 
address the problems that Brett saw with missing mail addresses in board 
reminders.

4) Sebb has moved the Apache phone book over to be based on data 
produced by whimsy.

5) Status monitoring is now implemented, and continues to be refined. 
It has already proven to be helpful.

6) As problems with the current secretary mail process seem to not be as 
prevalent this month, and the move to the new mail system by the 
infrastructure team isn't imminent, work on this has slowed in favor of 
other efforts.

7) Initial code has been roughed in for a replacement for the current 
LDAP Perl scripts used to add committers to a PMC and to modify PMC 
membership.  This effort may be ultimately be superseded Syncope.

- Sam Ruby