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Architecture Council/Minutes January 15 2009

Meeting Title: Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time: Tuesday January 8, 2009 at 1600 UTC / 0800 SFO / 1100 Ottawa / 1600 London / 1700 Berlin
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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 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
WTP: Tim deBoer TBA

Agenda / Notes

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

Review of Action Items

Administrative

  • New Members: Linda Chan, Sven Efftinge (new Strategic Member)
  • New Dormant Members - see Architecture Council/Members and Mentors
  • New Architecture Council/Templates
  • AC Admin via the Portal
    • bug 256318 - Need a page that lists projects and mentors for further processing (query for projects without mentors)
  • IP/Legal Discussions: Janet's E-Mail, AI Mike IPZilla closed group?
  • AC Website Revamp - Dave Carver
  • 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.

News from the EMO & Councils

New Topics

  • Philippe Mulet - 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
  • Version Numbering Galileo Update
  • Martin - Architectural Pillars of Eclipse
    • The original AC charter included a task to draw/maintain architecture diagrams
    • With Eclipse based technology in so many and diverse areas, what is it that makes Eclipse Eclipse?
    • Better understanding our Community
    • The License - EPL, the big effort of being IP clean, and awareness of IP
    • The Development Processs - Eclipse Projects are meant to be open, transparent and release by a known plan. Maturity stages. Commercial Open Source. Bugzilla, Newsgroups, Mailinglists.
    • Java - the language of choice for most stuff although there are efforts to allow other languages as well
    • OSGi / Equinox - The component model for everything at Eclipse, differentiates us from other communities (Apache, Netbeans)
    • SWT - Although there are few (runtime) efforts without SWT or with AWT/Swing integrations, SWT still builds a strong foundation for most Eclipse/RCP Apps and with the e4 investment in using SWT for Eclipse in the Browser, it'll likely remain so.
    • Application Model - the "twenty things", mostly UI/IDE concepts already, see E4/Eclipse Application Model
    • Others? E.g. Plugin Registry, our tooling (JDT, PDE), provisioning (p2)? What is it that newcomers need to learn first about Eclipse?

Recent Discussions

  • Mentorship
  • Tom S: Project Proposals - RCP infra for getting them in easily vs. Wiki pages
  • Tom S: Best practice for picking up I-builds - HTTP downloads are slow, installation cumbersome
  • Christian Kurzke (TmL project, DSDP PMC) - recurring scanning of all code for IP issues
  • Martin: Architecture Diagrams -
    • Eclipse is growing rapidly, and it's getting ever harder to understand what projects are available, how they are interrelated and where there is duplication.
    • It was the original AC charter to create an architecture plan
    • Can we auto-generate an architecture diagram? - Some ideas:
      • Scan the project's web pages and CVS Repository and build a semantic web
      • Analyze the MANIFEST.MF dependencies in each project's repository HEAD, generate a dependency graph out of it and use some graph layout / clustering algorithm (could we allow interactive zooming into clusters?)
      • Define some keywords, and ask each project use the Portal to pick keywords that are relevant for their project. Based on keyword association, have some graph auto-generated (clustered by keywords).
    • AI Martin ask on mailing list
  • Denis' blog on dead bugzilla's.
    • bug 256660 What are best practices to keep bugzilla alive and users interested, without taking away too much time from committers?
    • Should it be added as advice for mentored projects? Should the AC engage in the public discussion?

Old items

Action Items

  • (old) Martin to follow up with the m2eclipse and IAM projects regarding duplication
  • (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) 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

Next Meeting

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