Architecture Council/Minutes January 15 2009

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday January 15, 2009 at 1600 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 464440#

Attendees

• Use the Doodle Attendance Tracking Poll to confirm attendance or send regrets for this meeting. See this message for how to use it. 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.

BIRT:	Wenfeng Li	Gary Xue
DTP:	Brian Fitzpatrick	Linda Chan
DSDP:	Doug Gaff	Martin Oberhuber
Eclipse:	Philippe Mulet (drop off early)	Mike Wilson
Modeling:	Richard Gronback	Ed Merks
RT:	Jeff McAffer	Jochen Krause
STP:	Oisin Hurley	Antoine Toulme
Technology:	Gunnar Wagenknecht	Wayne Beaton
Tools:	John Duimovich
TPTP:	Eugene Chan	Oliver Cole Joanna Kubasta
WTP:	Tim deBoer	Dave Carver

• Signed-up: John Arthorne, Boris Bokowski, Sven Efftinge, Mik Kersten, Markus Knauer, Bernd Kolb (to proxy Karsten Schmidt), Andrew Overholt, Doug Schaefer, Darin Swanson, Tom Watson, David Williams, Darin Wright, Gary Xue
• Regrets: Eugene Chan, Doug Clarke, Oliver Cole, Adrian Colyer, John Graham, Wenfeng Li, Mike Milinkovich, Mary Ruddy, Georg Schmidt, Mark Vandenbrink
• No-Show: Chris Aniszczyk, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Naci Dai, Doug Gaff, Neil Hauge, Oisin Hurley, Jochen Krause, Ed Merks, Michael Scharf, Tom Schindl, Gunnar Wagenknecht

Agenda / Notes

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

Review of Action Items

• Last meeting Architecture Council/Minutes December 16 2008#Action Items
• All Mentors to enter their mentorship info into the Portal
• Dave Carver to have a look at the Architecture Council Wiki page and visually improve it for users/consumers
  • Concept was to organize wiki pages and add categories: Allows us to tag other (non-AC) pages such that they show up under AC
  • Always visible on bottom of the page; want to move up and make it more prominent? - It's very prominent on the main Wiki homepage now
  • Better organize the AC homepage: collect feedback... AI Dave send links to other Wiki pages for review to check which ones we might want to emulate.
  • Everyone can make suggestions / create mock-up pages for review.
• Dave Carver, Chris to add links for Project Proposal Template and Pulling Eclipse Scripts into the meeting notes, see Architecture Council/Minutes December 16 2008#New Topics
• Still open items moved to #Action Items

Administrative

• New Members: Linda Chan (Actuate, Bay Area, DTP), Sven Efftinge (new Strategic Member, itemis, northern Germany, TMF Lead)
• New Dormant Members - see Architecture Council/Members and Mentors
• New Architecture Council/Templates
  • AC Wiki pages are fairly complete now. Martin dumping his knowledge/E-Mail templates for others to use.
  • AI Everyone review the Wiki pages and change anything unclear. Feel free to edit the Wiki!
  • AI Andrew Overholt to chair next month's call (Feb 12)
• IP/Legal Discussions: IPZilla closed group is up, pending bug 214133 for accessing it through the Portal
• PMC Representation on the AC - backup delegates, 1 attendee required
• Efficient Communications
  • Many AC members are involved in very many things. Need to communicate efficiently, with low "data to noise ratio"
  • We already have: Bugzilla on creation/close only with opt-in; [URGENT] tag; Doodle for attendance tracking/voting; Wiki for discussions; anything else we could improve?
  • Goal should be that it is easy to track what we are doing without getting spammed, and get notified of urgent matters.
  • Avoid sending response to a meeting invitation / out-of-office back to the list (Mary, Mark, Eugene)
    • It's interesting that some others (IBM'ers) have responded privately to Martin (John A, Darin S, Tom W, Dave W, Kevin H)
  • Note the RSS Feed for the AC Mailing List: helpful for referencing previous postings
  • RESOLUTION: AC is happy with current communication patterns.

News from the EMO & Councils

• December Official Board Minutes not yet done
  • Doug Gaff summarizes the december board meeting on the Committer Reps Blog
• Mik: Are the EPP distributions "products"? Board says No. No clear actions out of that, but it should be reflected on the download pages.
  • McQ: It doesn't matter what we label the EPP packages as... users just treat them as such, especially wrt JDT
  • Much Platform/UI bug triage work goes into things that should really be associated with other projects: a large portion of bugs doesn't have value!
  • Can we label stuff as "limited support" ?
  • Can we do something like redhat (with RHEL / Fedora distros)
  • Jeff: Better highlight that there are supported offerings? Make it clearer what the support level is?
  • In Linux, are bugs reported against the distro or against upstream projects?
  • Martin: "Report a bug" wizard?
  • Boris: Why isn't there a "Services" company interested in creating a distro with a "report a bug" wizard and make money out of that?
  • Jeff: Make it clear in a positive way that stuff is available FOR FREE... and some bugs may be closed "WONTFIX"
  • Firefox and Openoffice are also treated as "products"...
  • Martin: "Expectation" discussion (to be held at planning council?) vs. technical "Low quality bugs" discussion
    • Mik: Help > Report this bug ... button in every distro that includes Mylyn been doing more harm than good so far
    • Kevin McGuire wanted to get bug auto-reported against Distro rather than component?
    • Boris: Platform UI tries to redirect bugs properly, not too big an issue for them
  • Martin: Windows 7 "Report a enhancement request with THIS component"
    • ... they set the expecatation like "We won't respond but your comment is valuable"
    • Mik: new "report bug" wizard allows to select any feature that has UI
    • Boris: "report bug" wizard could show a webpage with (paid) ads of companies for commercial support... commercial products could replace that by their commercial support page
    • Mik: Mylyn has an extension point for registering commercial support
    • AI Mik to propose a date for demoing the feature at EclipseCon
• StAC 090115 Minutes meeting for funding release train activities: following this meeting
  • Based on StAC 081028 Minutes SWOT analysis

New Topics

• EclipseCon - AC meeting on Sunday before the conference (Mar 22) afternoon
  • Proposed StAC meeting 3pm-5pm including the AC, PC and RC; but we have some topics (like mentorship) not so interesting for the other councils
  • Official Architecture Council/F2F EclipseCon 2009 from 5pm-6pm, inofficial afterwards (Program Committee get-together after 6pm); want to have pizza dinner
  • Architecture Council/Ask the AC Panel: many questions are important for ourselves to understand and answer consistently

• McQ - Eclipse Adoption and API Deprecation Policy
  • Platform clients have problems updating to newer Eclipse versions, in spite of remaining binary API compatible. Do others see this too?
  • How can inevitable migration effort (e.g. due to fixing semantic errors in API) be eased?
    • Tagging change / tools to detect change
  • How can we help clients become API-clean, and how can we help protect investment where API cleanliness is impossible?
    • Tools to report usage of non-API even in closed source
    • Allow clients to contribute unittests for code where they (have to) leverage internal non-API, in order to detect breakage early
  • How can we help clients detect usage of obsoleted features, and migrate to the new replacement feature more easily?
    • API Deprecation Policy / Soft deprecation tag
  • Is it reasonable to expect API-clean clients?
  • Dave Williams: Semantic differences are hard; in WTP, there are tools for scanning code and reporting back; would like to see PDE API Tools move into usage scanning as well
  • McQ: Want scanners on beyond-bundle-granularity to report usage. Should we do that between projects? Setup a database for the information?
  • Jeff: Low-fidelity / high-fidelity analyzers of usage
  • Martin: are we softening the "You must be API clean" story?
  • McQ: we should still be talking about "you must be API clean", but how can we live with reality? API does change. Take the low-level SWT event mechanism for instance. Can we tag non-API as "you're OK to use it"?
  • DaveW: at this point, we should be collecting information and then decide on what to do with the information.
  • Dave Carver: often, there is no way doing something without going "internal". How many people have actually requested something become API?
  • Report will also be good to find out what non-API should be made API
  • McQ: Formal deprecation policy?
    • Jeff: Setup another call for the deprecation thing? Start up simple and start a scanner for all of Eclipse.org
    • Darin: API Tooling currently working on scanners to discover references between plugins, generating report or dumping into a DB

Old items

• See also Architecture Council/Open Issues for overflow items that were not discussed

Action Items

• (old) Martin to follow up with the m2eclipse and IAM projects regarding duplication
• (old) Martin to follow up on Architecture Diagrams idea
• (old) Martin to start a Wiki page explaining what's good about having a mentor
• (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) Mik to create initial "architectural walkthrough" material for mylyn -- 1 wiki page not too large, send link to the mailing list (committed until end January)
• (old) Mike to inform everyone when the IPZilla Legal Closed Group is ready to use
• (old) All PMC's to encourage incubating grandfathered projects ask for a mentor (by filing an AC bug)
• Dave Carver send links to Wiki pages which we might want to emulate for the AC Homepage
• Mik to propose a date for demoing the Mylyn "report a bug" feature
• Everyone review/edit the various Architecture Council wiki pages, particularly the Architecture Council/Ask the AC Panel/FAQ and Architecture Council/Links collection. Add questions to the FAQ.
• Martin to schedule Architecture Council/Minutes API Deprecation 20080122 call
• Martin to schedule Architecture Council/F2F EclipseCon 2009 - Sunday 5pm-6pm

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council/Minutes API Deprecation 20080122 call on Thursday, Jan 22
• Architecture Council call on Thursday, February 12