The MCS Systems Group
Software Release Philsophy

 

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Last updated: Nov 9, 99.
Maintained by Systems.
     

At MCS, our group's primary responsibility is to build and maintain the computing and network environment. We're Systems and Network Administrators.

But, ask any systems administrator - with the demands of holding together a computing system, it's nearly impossible to find time to design and code a system. It's even harder to build something that other people can use in other environments.

However, we have a number of core beliefs that have helped to shape our software design and release strategy.

  • A computing environment should be designed and operated as a coherent unit, not as pile of individual machines. Our software is built around the philosophy of driving the entire network from one spot, and of having a way to describe the environment and then force the systems to conform to that description. We use databases and central repositories to help implement this philosophy.

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  • The State of Systems Administration and Systems Software must be improved. We believe that one of the best ways to do this is to build and release tools that help push the state of the field, or at least make people think about the issues. (Another good way is to write papers about tools, techniques and issues. Thanks to USENIX for creating a forum that enables this to happen.)
     
  • Release first, clean up second. Systems administrators have three major reasons not to release the tools they build.
    1. Systems administrators are all too busy to find time to code, and typically it's not part of their job description. Thus a lot of code that admins write is thrown together.
    2. Every site is different, and every tool is built with the requirements of that site in mind. Making the tool more widely useful takes a lot of extra work.
    3. It's very hard to find the time to support the code once it has been released if that's not what you're really supposed to be doing.
    Unfortunately, this means that most admins don't release code.
    Many times, though, someone else has a tool that we would love to use even if it took us half an hour of grepping through the code changing hard-coded paths before we could try it out. That's ok, we don't mind doing that, and we wouldn't complain.
    Thus we believe that it's better to get the code out there and let people stomp around on it than to keep it hidden internally and never let it out. And, while we can't commit the time to officially support our code at other sites, we've find that doing what we can to address issues helps to improve the quality of the code.

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  • Open Source is Good. For many, many years, we've been using free software from the net. We could not have built the environment we have now without it, and we could not run our computers without it. We believe in the communities that open source helps to nurture and we believe we should do our part to contribute.

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In other words - you're welcome to the tools we've built. Please tell us what you think. They may not be perfect yet, but we're happy that we can build them and get them to you at all. Hopefully you'll feel the same way.