Equinox Meeting Minutes/20090630

Agenda

Galileo Retrospective

Please add your retrospective items here. We will have a retrospective discussion based on the input provided here.

• OSGi Specification delays put our release at risk. What measures, if any, can we take to avoid issues in future releases? What specification schedule would be acceptable for including on the June Eclipse train? --Tjwatson.us.ibm.com 15:11, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• The Equinox/Eclipse projects have strict ramp down schedules, API freeze dates and rules on how to evolve API from release to release. When Equinox/Eclipse projects place a dependency on another project at eclipse what should our policy be for enforcing these rules on the other project? --Tjwatson.us.ibm.com 15:11, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• Our formal plan was a bit too ambitious. We should start with a smaller set and consider adding new plan items later if we have time, rather than starting with a large set and deferring a lot. --JohnA 14:32, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• We've become a bit too scared of introducing API, and now we have a growing body of provisional API that has downstream consumers. This will create pressure to keep our provisional API stable, give advance warning of changes etc. We should make it a high priority to convert provisional API used by clients into real API (using data from PDE API tools usage scans) --JohnA 14:32, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• Similar to the API topic John mentions. We have been reluctant to make changes to the framework adaptor hooks. This is not true API (it is of the SPI flavor) but a few projects have hard dependencies on the hooks. Weaving, transforms, EclipseLink all have dependencies on the adaptor hooks. I also know a few commercial products that use them. When is it appropriate to make "breaking" changes to this SPI? --Tjwatson.us.ibm.com 15:17, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• Our build process is closely tied to Eclipse project which gives us less flexibility

Attendees

• Andrew Niefer
• DJ Houghton
• Jeff McAffer
• John Arthorne
• Tom Watson

Minutes

• Still trying to close on a new meeting time that works for everyone
• OSGi spec alignment
  • Want to push for OSGi specs to be final before we ship
  • Otherwise we may have to ship on an older spec revision
  • Possibly have additional Equinox releases aligning with OSGi spec releases
• Plan items
  • A bit too fine-grained with plan items
  • Agreed to start with smaller set of items with high probability of being done
  • Try to draw all possible contributors into the planning process
• Cross-project dependencies
  • Need two-way dialog between two projects about expectations for ramp down policy, how to deal with last minute changes
  • Possibly add review conditions in upstream project ramp-down policy if applicable (for example it might make sense for ECF ramp-down policy to include a review from an Equinox committer due to dependency)