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Meeting Minutes

Helios Planning Meeting 2009/08/05

Attendees

- Heiko Behrens (records) - Jan Köhnlein - Knut Wannheden - Moritz Eysholdt - Peter Friese - Sebastian Zarnekow - Sven Efftinge (moderator)

Agenda =

- Retrospective (Post Mortem) - Process - Infrastructure <BREAK> - Planning Helios

Retrospective

Each participant outlined his ideas about good and bad things that happened during the last year. The overall impression is that Xtext was great fun and a huge success. On the downside we agreed that we had a bad RC phase (too many changes) and we could further improve communication between committers (see process for actions).

Some other topics which arise were:

• code ownership*

- not a good idea, everybody agrees

• lack of time*

- research project will improve this - individuals should find their own ways

• breaking changes / bad RC phase*

- Maturity of framework will lead to more stability, needed flexibility - @stable/@deprecated annotation will remain, not automatic tests - primary hooks will be revealed via documentation - migration guide will inform user before a migration (on new version) - New and Noteworthy will be managed

• Xpand/MWE*

- These components are quite important for the impression of Xtext, they act as "backend" - So far *just maintained*. Sven will take care of establishing milestone telkos and the like.

Process

- we will continue to hold milestone planning meetings.
- we use bugzilla as our primary communication channel.
- we use target milestone to identify the current todos. 
- we improve our commit messages (as already done lately)
- conference calls will be hold on demand
- outdated documents shall be removed or updated

we now have an HTML page describing our process : [[1]]

Infrastructure

- We need to improve turn-arounds
- Smaller workspaces (one for each Xtext, Xpand, MWE)
- dedicated target platforms
- .project settings for formatting, encoding, etc.
- Evaluation of SVN resulted in : seems to be too slow, we will stay with CVS
- local builds are now possible with Athena, this opens way to introduce server-side generation, promoting is still an issue with Athena
- find a way to avoid checking in generated code

Planning Helios

• • Wiki Document

- CleanUps clean-up repository, wiki refactorings API) will be handled during the milestones usage patterns of guice have to be documented generator tests: amount of fragments stays the same (no reduced set of fragments) evaluate: Antlr on the server to allow server-side test generation logging: discuss with other project for better solutions, logging needs some improvements

- NewFeatures Sven describes BaseLanguage nad how the viewpoints can benefit from it

- other topcis many good ideas, priorisation will happen during milestone planning - No official Xtend customization in future, base language will supersede

• • Themes (over the year)

- Usability -- UI Quality & Features -- API Quality -- Documentation Quality

- Performance & Scalability

- Increase Applicability -- Base Language -- Grammar Features

- Clean Code

- Project plan => Sven will edit the project plan => Annotation Bug (Formatter, Warning, Validation once, datatype/fragment?)