Difference between revisions of "Architecture Council/Meetings/September 9 2010"

Revision as of 12:43, 9 September 2010

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday September 9, 2010 at 1500 UTC / 0800 SFO / 1100 Ottawa / 1600 London / 1700 Berlin attention DST change HTML | iCal
Dial-in:	NEW Canada 1-877-727-8553 toll free / 1-416-840-9801 caller paid NEW U.S. 1-866-394-4146 toll free / 1-480-629-1624 caller paid NEW passcode 428029063

Attendees

All AC Members are invited.

• PMC Reps please confirm attendance or list your delegate below. Every PMC is required to name a primary and backup delegate, and to ensure that one delegate attends the meeting.

• Regrets: Oliver Cole (standing conflict), Wenfeng Li (standing conflict), Mik Kersten

Agenda / Notes

• Feel free to edit, but not during the call!

Review of Last Meeting

• Architecture Council/Meetings/August 12 2010
• (old) Tim write up an initial wiki page with information for people to standardize on the tracing API
• Martin revise the AC Wiki to make it easier to find the New Member Process. More links on homepage. More usage of categories.
• Martin bug 315210 Make the AC mailing list open / moderated
• Antoine / Dave C bug 316642 Requirements Wiki for build systems
• Still open items moved to #Action Items

New Topics

• Findbugs day / Fixit challenge - Dave C
  • Ed likes the idea... but how configurable is Findbugs to avoid false positives just due to style?
  • Wayne: Producers of FindBugs have been using Eclipse as a test project
  • Resolution follow up in a bug, key will be getting a good config to only show bugs but no stlye issues

• bug 324125 architecture diagrams - 2006 version - relationship to e4 ?
  • Ed - nice to have, but who's going to produce them?
  • Wayne - core question is, are these valuable? If yes, what is the smallest amount of work possible creating something useful?
  • Jeff - Platform: Technical details like OSGi bundles etc are well covered... but what is the relationship between projects on top of the Platform ? What can be used together?
    • From a Consumer point of view, always hard to find out how eg the Modeling projects work together
    • Eg relationship RAP - EMF - Eclipselink ... how to put something together with Persistence + Web
  • Martin - looks like interaction between projects would just be documenting what evolved ad-hoc
  • Jeff - having no deliberate architecture sounds like failure of the AC in the past
  • Michael - opposite is also true, avoiding dependencies
  • How to sell this ... who is the target audience? Value to committers / adopters seems small
  • Wayne: A PDE component can draw a dependency graph .. but what is the value?
    • Jeff: RCP came about by having the community ask for removing dependencies
• Diagrams are a vehicle, not a means to an end.
  • Looking at current architecture, it appears too "stacked"
• Wayne has a newer diagram for the Platform in a presentation somewhere ... rectifying the diagrams is not too much work
  • Martin: Rectifying current diagrams + collecting statements might be helpful .. on a Wiki page
  • To keep that from getting stale, would need to make it a recurring agenda item
• Ed: Dependency issues are likely best driven by Community ("what they want").
  • Some dependencies are really annoying, but well-known and unlikely to change (eg EMF -> Resources, making it unusable in RCP)
• Truth is, we have ad-hoc dependencies, but it's unlikely to change
  • Cleanup only happens with sufficient pressure / value to consumers.
  • If we cannot effect change, we can just document things
• AI Wayne create an "Eclipse Platform Architecture" Wiki page with a diagram he already has as slideware. Continue discussion from there

• Helios API Usage report
  • How much of an issue is it (related to e4)?
  • Handling of provisional API ? E.g. o.e.debug.internal.ui.viewers.model.provisional.IChildrenCountUpdate
  • promote usage of x-friends / startup extension (as per zx mail)
  • Darin thinks that client of API should request producer of API to be a friend (and allow producer to say yes or no)
  • Jeff: non-API usage is really a bug... but allow consumers to request being a friend
    • Value of promoting friend-usage is diagram cleanup / reducing noise
    • In order to promote the effort, could create some statistics of showing the biggest offenders
  • Jeff would like no internal references in the release train ... exemption when a request exists asking for new API
    • If we really think there should be no non-API use, we should walk the walk and enforce it
    • We can promote the idea, but control resides with the PC
  • Current report is user-based ... Darin wants a consumer-based report in Indigo bug 322571 on the PDE/Plan/3.7

• Build systems requirements - Antoine, Dave C
• News from the Board, EMO and Councils

e4 - current state of affairs

• PC / Release Train Relationship to Eclipse 4.0

Items for next meeting

Regular briefing on the status of e4.

Old Topics

We need to reduce our bug backlog, by actually coming to a common resolution on some. Here are the most recent ones:

• DaveC would like to discuss New Committer Guidelines; Scrum / Agile techniques
• bug 285074 - Dave Carver - Hudsonbuilder and write access to the cvs / svn repo
• bug 288393 - Denis - Bugzilla Best Practices

• AC Bugzilla backlog
• See also Architecture Council/Open Issues for overflow items that were not discussed
• News from the EMO and Councils ?

Action Items

• (old) Martin to follow up on Architecture Diagrams idea
• (old) Michael to flesh out the Patterns idea and remind the EAC -- started Architecture Council/Top Ten Recommendations#Design Patterns, backed by EclipseCon tutorial proposals
  • While these show how well-known GoF patterns are applied in Eclipse, Michael's idea was more to find and describe new patterns which are specific to Eclipse
• (old) Michael to draft an E-Mail about the "plugin granularity" idea, searching for people to lead the effort
• (old) Tools and Tech PMC's to encourage incubating grandfathered projects find a mentor; mentorless projects due to AC members quitting or falling dormant
• (old) Martin to add Eclipsecon meeting notes onto the wiki
• (old) Mik to create initial "architectural walkthrough" material for Mylyn -- 1 wiki page not too large, send link to the mailing list
• (old) Dave C work with Wayne on a "handbook" for project criteria for becoming a committer (referencing committer guidelines)
  • Martin - recently updated the Eclipse/Workspace/Committer_FAQ#Becoming_a_Committer with pretty strict criteria (committed contributions)
• (old) Dave C come up with a document how to save build resources
• (old) Dave C to try bugzilla UNCONFIRMED state
• (old) Wayne to ask Sonatype about Nexus test installation
• (old) Wayne to try doing a 3.6m2 API Report on Helios m2
• (old) Martin to file bug for asking Mik hyperlink Wikitext / crowdsourcing Docs handbook on the Architecture Council/Top Ten Project Development Practices page
• (old) Tom S Athena Common Builder Cookbook
• (old) Tim write up an initial wiki page with information for people to standardize on the tracing API
• Martin revise the AC Wiki to make it easier to find the New Member Process. More links on homepage. More usage of categories.
• Martin bug 315210 Make the AC mailing list open / moderated
• Antoine / Dave C bug 316642 Requirements Wiki for build systems

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council/Meetings/October 14 2010