Architecture Council/Minutes August 14 2008

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday August 14, 2008 at 1500 UTC / 0800 SFO / 1100 Ottawa / 1600 London / 1700 Berlin HTML | iCal
Dial-in:	(+1) 613.287.8000 (Ottawa and international) or 866.362.7064 (toll-free North America) passcode 874551#

Attendees

• Sign up here if you want to get mentioned, since it's hard to catch all names during the call.
• Signed-up: Mary Ruddy, Darin Swanson, John Arthorne, Eugene Chan, Brian Fitzpatrick, Martin Oberhuber
• Tentative: John Duimovich,
• Regrets: Harm Sluiman, John Wiegand, Oliver Cole, Mike Wilson

Agenda / Notes

• Feel free to edit!
• Rotating Chair Position

EAC Role, and how to make it more relevant

• From our charter: "responsible for the development, articulation, and maintenance of the Eclipse Platform Architecture and ensuring the Principles of the Development Process through mentorship."
  • Mentorship can encompass many things - EAC as source for mentors, mentoring mentors
  • "Pull" model: Allow adding eclipse.org-architecture-council@eclipse.org on CC on bugzilla for tough questions (rather than being active itself, the EAC is there to respond / mentor, and to identify issues)
    • Cross-project Architecture Council Discovery and Reuse Activity: better a pull-model ("ask the combined wisdom") rather than a static page that tends to be out of date... or, come up with a process to auto-update the webpage?
  • EAC Be a platform where pain points can be raised - but closer to committers than the Board. Suggest actions or create separate working group to work on things (Any pain points that come to mind?)
    • Relationship of EAC compared to committer board reps? Don't duplicate board rep work. Probably delegate some topics to board reps?

• • Invite people to present architectural questions for discussion at EAC meetings
    • EAC is also a platform for exchanging news, ideas, and best practices among the Mentors

• What's making the monthly meetings attractive and interesting?
  • If meetings are short, and members gain something from the meetings (insights, news, experiences).

Meeting Dates

• We now got Google Calendar invitations. Responding to the invitations allows me to pre-fill the meeting attendee list.
• Regular meeting date suggestions:

(a) Keep 2nd Thurs of the month at 11am EST: not for Oliver Cole

(b) 2nd Thurs of the month at 12 EST: not for

(c) 3rd Wed of every month at 11am EST: not for

(d) 3rd Wed of every month at 12 EST: not for

(e) 2nd Tues of every month at 11am EST: not for

Council Membership

• From the Development Process: The Architecture Council will, at least annually, recommend to the EMO(ED), Eclipse Members who have sufficient experience, wisdom, and time to be appointed to the Architecture Council and serve as Mentors.
• EAC members appointed for a 3-year period.
• Any inactive members to prune off the councils page? - Suggestion to add the Year of joining for appointed members, such that inactivity can be tracked.
• Have E-Mail proposals / elections like last year? Probably later this year?

Discussions

ISchedulingRule

• Markus Schorn: bug 240888 - ISchedulingRule.isConflicting() vs. ISchedulingRule.contains() not clearly documented, how to use it with RuleFactory and MultiRule?
• Asking the combined wisdom of the EAC, how projects tend to be using IJobManager. Is the EAC the right platform for this, or where should this be discussed?
• Original problem was how to save Project Preferences properly.
  • Creating a Job that should not conflict with other instances of itself, so an ISchedulingRule was attached. But implementation of the Job could call out to other (unknown) APIs, e.g. savePreferences, which cannot take new SchedulingRules.
  • It looks like the Creator of that Job needs to know all kinds of rules that would be needed later on, by implementations that it does not know, in order to create a proper "Master Rule". This is against information hiding.
  • ISchedulingRule#contains() can disable all rule checking. How to use RuleFactory and MultiRule properly?

LGPL

• Dave Carver, Ed Merks: EPL to LGPL relation not clear, has been a topic for the board.
• GTK version of SWT links against LGPL'd lib? What can and can not be done?
• Is the EAC the right place for such questions?

Other Ideas for Discussion

• Mentoring New Projects
  • Experiences? What could be improved?
  • Nick & Denis Build Workshop 2: Build Harder -- to be continued under Dash when Nick is back from honeymoon & vacation. Adding a representative of Dash to the EAC?
  • Webpage improvements: more pre-canned content for new projects (like Sourceforge)?

• Mentoring Galileo: What could be improved?
  • Running each project's unittests with full Galileo installed; especially interesting for Performance tests
  • Don't duplicate work done by the Planning Council

• E4 now has bi-weekly calls -- won't discuss E4 on the EAC unless asked / invited

• Eclipse Pain Points
  • Performance & Memory Footprint, Bloat; Restrictions on Resource model (Maven); IP due diligence
  • Lots of these issues are already worked on by E4, and/or Committer Representatives at the Board, and/or the Planning Council
  • But the EAC's charter includes identifying and naming pain pionts... anything not yet being addressed?
    • Re-activate Top Ten Architectural Problems in all of Eclipse ?
    • Re-activate Architecture Council Discovery and Reuse Activity ?

Action Items

• Last meeting Architecture Council/Minutes July 10 2008#Action Items
• All: Find an Expert who knows Macro Recording in other Apps (Emacs, OpenOffice? KDE? Others?)
  • Martin found Max Gilead, who was working with OpenOffice.org's UNO remote communication facility and during that work written a little library on top of it called DUO which provides more user (developer :) ) - friendly access to some of the features. He agreed to give some thoughts when back from a business trip.

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council call on Thursday, September 11