Architecture Council/Minutes October 9 2008

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday October 9, 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 464440#

Attendees

• Sign up here (alphabetical by last name), since it's hard to catch all names during the call.
• Signed-up:
• Tentative:
• Regrets:
• Unknown:
  • Chris Aniszczyk, John Arthorne, Wayne "Mad Dog" Beaton, Boris Bokowski, Eugene Chan, Brian Fitzpatrick, Jeff McAffer, Ed Merks, Philippe Mulet, Martin Oberhuber, Doug Schaefer, Michael Scharf, August Schmidt, Darin Swanson, Thomas Watson, Darin Wright
  • John Duimovich, David Williams
  • Oliver Cole, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, John Graham, Richard Gronback, Mik Kersten, Markus Knauer, Andrew Overholt, Gunnar Wagenknecht, John Wiegand
  • Doug Clarke, Adrian Colyer, Naci Dai, Timothy deBoer, Doug Gaff, Thomas Hallgren, Neil Hauge, Oisin Hurley, Jochen Krause, Wenfeng Li, Mike Milinkovich, Steve Northover, Brett Porter, Mary Ruddy, Mark Vandenbrink, Mike Wilson, Gary Xue

Agenda / Notes

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

Review of Action Items

• Last meeting Architecture Council/Minutes September 11 2008#Action Items
• (old) Mik to create initial "architectural walkthrough" material for mylyn. One more to follow before publicly announcing?
• (old) MichaelS to draft an E-Mail about the "plugin granularity" idea, searching for people to lead the effort
• Martin to send out E-Mail about the EAC Bug component
• Wayne to list mentor-less technology projects on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors page
• All PMC's to list mentor-less projects in their domain on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors page
• Everyone to hyperlink to their Bio on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors page
• Martin to add call-in details to Google Calendar Reminders
• Everyone to edit the Architecture Council/Top Ten Recommendations page
• Everyone to hyperlink on the new Architecture Council/Links Collection to interesting architecture-related blogs, articles or other resources
• Michael to flesh out the Patterns idea and remind the EAC

Administrative

• New Members

How to start Releng?

• How to start a releng project for unattended builds on the ML - PDE build docs are good but only half the story
• Bjorn, NickB & Denis Build Workshop 3: Build Hard With A Purpose but is that an answer for now? Current status?
  • Refer people to clone existing projects' releng? Which ones are good?

Top Ten Recommendations

• Architecture Council/Top Ten Recommendations
• Architecture Council/Links Collection

Relationship to E4

• Invite E4 to present to the EAC?

Concurrency

• Examples: bug 245573 comment 12 (Dali JPA Tools Deadlock, John CC'd to EAC); bug 246840 discussion about ISchedulingRule (saving project preferences)
• What is causing issues?
  • work performed during class loading (Activator.start()) - unknown context, can run at unpredictable times
  • work performed in callbacks - unknown context, avoid synchronous callbacks
  • General recommendations: (e.g. avoid synchronous callbacks, avoid in Activator.start(), static initializers or Singleton getters) - a general recommendation could be to avoid performing work at unpredictable times, but that would recommend against lazy initialization in general
  • Does anybody have a well-working, consistent model on top of the current infrastructure?
  • Totally new concurrency mechanism as part of E4 ?
    • David Orme mentions DataBinding Realms and the Threads Considered Harmful blog which references Erlang message-based concurrence
    • Would it help to become more asynchronous under the hood, even if old APIs need to remain for compatibility?
    • Are there any other good known models for concurrency?
  • Better Javadoc ?
    • Example: ISchedulingRule.isConflicting() vs. ISchedulingRule.contains(), and how does it relate to RuleFactory and MultiRule?
  • Articles ? - John referenced the resouce-deltas article

Other Ideas for Discussion

• Mentoring New Projects
  • Experiences? What could be improved?
  • 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
  • Integrated bug reporting: Mylyn is providing a bug/error/enhancement reporting facility that will provide a flexible and product-configurable mapping between features, bundles and bug trackers bug 212209 (Example: http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/8/86/Mylyn-Bug-Reporting-Example.jpg ). Do we want this for Galileo?

• 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 and the processes around it
  • 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 ?

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council call on Thursday, November 13