Difference between revisions of "Architecture Council/Minutes September 11 2008"

Revision as of 11:18, 11 September 2008

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday September 11, 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: John Arthorne, Chris Aniszczyk, Wayne "Mad Dog" Beaton, Boris Bokowski, Eugene Chan, Brian Fitzpatrick, Philippe Mulet, Martin Oberhuber, Michael Scharf, August Schmidt, Darin Swanson, Thomas Watson, Darin Wright
• Tentative: John Duimovich, David Williams (will join late, if my conflict ends early)
• Regrets: Oliver Cole (standing meeting), John Graham(last minute client mtg), Richard Gronback (travelling), Mik Kersten (travelling), Markus Knauer (g-Eclipse tutorial), Andrew Overholt (meeting conflict), Gunnar Wagenknecht (city council meeting), John Wiegand (travelling)

Agenda / Notes

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

Review of Action Items

• Last meeting Architecture Council/Minutes August 14 2008#Action Items
• Boris to start Architecture Council/Top Ten Recommendations
• Martin to draft an E-Mail to eclipse.org-committers for review, inviting to put EAC on CC of bugs
• Martin to send E-Mail to EAC list as a reminder for "Architectural Walkthrough".
  • Mik to create initial "architectural walkthrough" material for mylyn. One more to follow before publicly announcing?
• MichaelS to draft an E-Mail about the "plugin granularity" idea, searching for people to lead the effort
• Bjorn or Anne to add a "year of appointment" to members on the councils page
• Martin to propose alternate meeting scheme on the mailing list
• Everyone to think about time commitments that can be made for "architectural things" at Eclipse (3 hours == 1 hr meeting + 2 hrs E-Mail and mentoring)
• Everyone to propose new members on the mailing list
• Martin to create bugzilla bugs for the ISchedulingRule (bug 246840 and LGPL {bug|246945}} discussions

Administrative

• Meeting Dates - any additional comments? The vote was to keep 2nd thursday of each month (and I propose moving to tuesday as first choice in case there is a public holiday or other conflict on thursday).
• EAC and bugzilla, and the E-Mail to Committers
  • Spamming the list already?
  • Virtual inbox (eac-inbox@eclipse.org) or direct mailing list address as bugzilla user?
  • Who wants to be a secret-keeper of the EAC user's bugzilla password?
• Architecture Council/Members and Mentors - is it accurate?
  • What projects should have a mentor? (Every / Incubation / Those who ask / ...?)
  • Who's mentoring Apogee?
  • What to do with the COSMOS and Aperi projects, which seem mentorless after Harm Sluiman quit
  • Can we (auto)generate a list of mentor-less projects?
  • Other wishes for re-assigning mentorship?
  • Should the list express some "area of expertise" with mentors like "technical/coder" vs. "management" ?
• Dormant Status Proposal:
  • Do the 3 month / 1 year times make sense?
  • Mike needs to sign off changes in membership
• New Member Proposals:
  • Are we too big a crowd already? New Member Proposals?
  • Some ideas (from E4 mostly): Dave Carver, Tom Schindl, Scott Lewis, Konstantin Kommissarchik, Kevin McGuire, David Orme, Paul Webster, Paul Coltron
• Google Calendar Bugs and Requests -- does anybody know how to report them?
  • Changing an event, "Dont send" does send notifications
  • Response from to mailing list invitation should track attendance of each member separately
• Welcome Gunnar Wagenknecht as Technology PMC representative to the Architecture Council

News from the Board (EMO)

• We have board reps and EMO reps on the council (Mike, Bjorn, Jeff, Ed, zx, Mik and Doug Gaff; Wayne)
• Would like to have a standing "news from the board" topic, since as mentors we should be top informed
• Other channels (PlanetEclipse, Blog, Committers / Project-leads mailing list, ...) should work but 1st-hand is better
• Do information channels work well?

Top Ten Recommendations

• Architecture Council/Top Ten Recommendations
• More recommendations?
• Add links into some code which exposes a recommendation as example?
• Could easily convert a Recommendation into an article / blog post / ... ("The EAC Series")

Deadlocks, Jobs and Scheduling

• 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
  • work performed in callbacks - unknown context
  • Job / SchedulingRule intermixed with Resources - cannot extend rules after the fact, need to know who locks what internally
• What can we do to make the Platform safer for Concurrency?
  • Come up with some items in our Architecture Council/Top Ten 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

LGPL Works-with vs. Requires

bug 246945

How to start Releng?

• Question from a new project: I am trying to create some update sites and build scripts for TmL and I am having some difficults to find some reference material to working with this. Do you have any idea where I can find a starter material to do that??
  • 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?
  • Refer to the PDE Build docs? But that's only half of the story?

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 ?

Action Items

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council call on Thursday, October 9