| [birt-dev] Eclipse BIRT PMC Meeting Minutes - Monday, August 29, 2005 |
Meeting
BIRT PMC, 10am Pacific, Monday, August 29, 2005
Attendees
Wenfeng Li - BIRT PMC Lead - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Paul Clenahan - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Scott Rosenbaum - BIRT PMC - Innovent Solutions (www.innoventsolutions.com)
Jason Weathersby - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Minutes
August 22nd, 2005 Meeting
There was no BIRT PMC meeting on August 22nd due to travel schedule conflicts for the Eclipse Council meetings on August 23rd-25th.
BIRT 2.0 Planning
As indicated in previous minutes, the candidate projects for BIRT 2.0 continue to be available on the BIRT project Wiki pages: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/wiki/index.php?n=BPS.BPS.
The development teams are continuing to scope the candidate projects and we are getting closer to be able to create the BIRT 2.0 plan to share with the community. We are still targeting mid-September for the plan.
Eclipse Councils Update
Paul C gave an update on the Requirements Council and Wenfeng L gave an update on the Planning and Architecture Councils. The full minutes for these Councils will be available online from the EMO at: http://www.eclipse.org/org/council.html.
For the Requirements Council, Paul C has the action item to create Bugzilla entries for enhancement requests that the BIRT project has for other Eclipse projects in order to support BIRT development.
For the Planning Council, a plan was proposed to have top-level projects "opt-in" to synchronize with the main (typically mid-year) Eclipse Platform release. Projects could also have additional releases that were not synchronized with a platform release if desired. The benefits of the synchronized model were discussed at the Planning Council Meeting -- one of the key benefits being a single synchronized set of releases for the community.
At the meeting, Wenfeng L tentatively agreed that the BIRT project would opt-in to this model. As a follow-up from the Planning Council meeting, the PMC discussed this and all agreed that the BIRT project would opt-in to the synchronized release model, starting with the upcoming Eclipse 3.2 release. We will start this process by syncing with the platform 3.2 M3 release in November, 2005.
At this stage, it is also very likely that the BIRT project would also continue to have additional releases in order to make the rapidly growing set of BIRT functionality quickly available to the community.
At the Planning Council meeting, Bjorn also proposed a standard XML format for conveying release plan information (see http://www.eclipse.org/org/processes/Guidelines_for_Eclipse_Development_Process/status-and-planning-reporting.html). This would allow the plans from multiple projects to be easily consolidated for the community. The PMC agrees with this idea and supports this initiative.
Lastly, at the Planning Council meeting, Bjorn proposed standardizing the web site menu for all projects with some agreed items that are common to all projects. This would then be supplemented with project specific menu items and content as needed. The goal would be to make it easier for a person visiting the eclipse.org site to be able to easily find out about projects and consume Eclipse technology.
The BIRT PMC is in general agreement that this is a good idea, but are concerned about the specific menu items that Bjorn was suggesting. Specifically, the menus were very focused on developers who might want to extend the Eclipse based technology and not so much on developers who want to use the technology as is. For example, many developers download and use the Platform and JDT projects as their Java IDE -- and we need to include content that is focused on that audience. The BIRT PMC needs to communicate this feedback to Bjorn to see how we might handle this.
EclipseCon Presentation Proposals
We have been refining the EclipseCon presentation proposals based on feedback. The plan is to get these finalized and posted on the EclipseCon conference site by early September at the latest.