Future plans?

[JakeSays]

Are there any plans for this repo, or is it just a code drop that will never change? There has been no activity in months.

[JakeSays]

ping..

[JakeSays]

Ping again.. :(

[JakeSays]

Seriously - can we get an answer to this?

[MsftBrettShirley]

I am sorry for the long delay in response. I have wanted to respond for quite some time, but needed some spare time to convey completely my position.

So first just let me fully disclose at the very least my personal (but probably on average also the team) position. We are always pretty busy making Active Directory, some other Microsoft ESE-based product, and especially the O365 mail service better - through lower cost, more robust hardware corruption isolation, and faster client response times. This is our priority 1 job for Microsoft corp. And sharing any value in our code base externally is job #2 or if I am being frank job #3 or #4. I just want to level set there. But we do very much enjoy sharing our code. OK, so let me say plans as I sort of see it ...

First, there are sort of 2 phases to the plans: there is sort of a "closed period" of plans and a later "open period" of plans ...

What I mean by closed period plans - there is a set of steps we just must get done to be fully open sourced. The community can not really help, nor alter / provide input on that set of plans. We know and are certain what we want / intend to do there. Like as an example the comments are being sanitized right now in sync out to github, this is not ideal as it makes the process of taking a change in from github, difficult - the line numbers do not even match up. And the process of pushing to github is not automated. And test code is not shared out. Just some general infrastructure and getting ALL the ESE code shared out is the very next plan.

And then an open period - once the closed plans are done, we will be ready for the community to provide actual input on what they want ... it could be anything from "code explainers" for significant components, mini-features that a dev might take a crack at, how to use this or that sub-component in your code, etc.

Closed period tasks (in approximate order):

1. Sanitize the code's comments, such that the internal / external code match exactly.
2. Create an automated push method, so our internal code flows out to this github repo on a regular cadence.
3. Share out ancillary dev code (and gengen.bat) that was not pushed in initial release. Enough dev code to properly modify the dev code.
4. Share out test code (there may actually be a few iterations of this ... there is A LOT of test code).
5. Get test tree building enough to support accept.bat.
6. Share out accept.bat / basically our p0 unit tests script. Will require some alteration to avoid some dev code we are unlikely to ever share out.
   Note: THIS is the first step where we might consider taking changes. We ESE engineers often only run these tests for the most minor of bug fixes, or features without a lot of external interface (thus no need for new test code).
7. Get full test tree building.
8. Get full test pass running.

I just wanted to give you an explicit or discrete sense of what tasks there are - so you will know how fast the closed period is progressing. As for the open period, you are free to contribute suggestions there. I have created a tag "OpenPeriodAsk" issues, such that you might communicate anything you are more interested in when we get there. And created some random issues / asks as thought fodder.

Finally let me say, we have no timeline on the closed period completion, but think months to a year or more. As time allows. I hope for only several months. And I should not expect that all closed period tasks have to proceed ANY open period asks ... maybe some light documentation asks, or interest in how this or that in code works can be responded to earlier. But the closed period tasks is the critical stuff obviously.

[JakeSays]

@MsftBrettShirley Thank you for the update! I really appreciate it.

I have a lot of experience developing against ESE and would love to see it running on Linux. When the ESE code was first released I ported some of it to get a sense of what the task entails, and it is doable.

I am thinking of continuing work on the port as I have some projects that would benefit from using ESE.

[MsftBrettShirley]

Jake, can you send me an email message at eseoss@microsoft.com? Thanks.

[darianmiller]

It's been more than a year - can you post another update?