[cdt-dev] CDT meeting minutes

[Sebastien Marineau <sebastien@xxxxxxx>]

CDT meeting and teleconference held on Monday December 9th, 2002

========
Present:

Montavista:
   Lee Courtney
   Joe Green
   Brian Eliot
   Brian Moyle
Macraigor
   Jim Macraigor
Programming Research
   Mark Langan
QNX
   Sebastien Marineau
   Thomas Fletcher
   Judy Green
   David Inglis
   Alain Magloire
   Mikhail Khodjaiants
   Peter Graves
   Shelley Bryen
Rational
   Sky Matthews
   John Camelon
   Cory Bialowas
   Sean Evoy
   Doug Schaefer
   Hoda Amer
Redhat
   Tom Tromey
   Don Howard
   Phil Muldoon
   Rick Moseley
SAS
   Ed Burnette
Timesys
   Manas Saksena
   Gene Sally
   Omar Naseer
   Sam Robb
Tensilica
   Chris Songer
   Peter Macliesh
Wasabi
   Ross Harvey


======
Agenda

- State of the CDT
- Update from CDT participants
- New participants
- Project infrastructure
- Planning (6 month goals/prios)
- Varia
- Follow-up


1. State of the CDT
Slides are posted on the web site that outline the CDT activities
over the last 6 months. These include the setting up of the project
infrastructure, updating of the debugger, and the CDT 1.0 release.
Please see the following URL:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/cdt-home/news/12-200
2/cdt-state-dec.ppt?cvsroot=Tools_Project


2. Update from participants

Lee Courtney gave an update on the work that Montavista has been doing
with Eclipse and the CDT. Unfortunately, due to other commitments,
Montavista
has not been able to commit as much time to the CDT as originally planned. 
They are hoping to have more time to dedicate to the project in the new
year.

Tom Tromey gave an update on the activities at Redhat. Redhat has been
helping
with the debugger on the gdb side, as well as with testing of the CDT. They
also
have work underway for build and packaging of Eclipse, some Linux-specific
plugins and are looking into performance issues (again on Linux hosts).

Doug Schaefer presented slides on Rational's direction. The slides can
be found on the CDT website at:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/cdt-home/news/12-200
2/rational-cdt.ppt?cvsroot=Tools_Project 
Rational is gearing up with resources and
will drive the development of the build model and CDOM.

Thomas Fletcher talked about QNX's activities. On top of being the main
commiters
to the CDT, QNX has been working on integrating the CDT into their next
commercial
release of Momentics.


3. New participants

Chris Songer from Tensilica prepared some slides giving background on
Tensilica
as well as outlining their work with Eclipse and the CDT. The slides are on
the CDT web site at:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/cdt-home/news/12-200
2/tensilica-cdt.ppt?cvsroot=Tools_Project

Timesys has been moving all of their tools to Eclipse. They are currently
migrating to the CDT, and have interest in helping with the builder and 
launcher.

Programming Research builds static analysis tools for C/C++ and Java. Their
interest in the CDT is to possibly integrate their analysis tools with
the CDT. Mark also mentioned that they have a lot of experience with C/C++
parsing, so they will probably be most involved with the CDOM/parser
discussions.

SAS builds products that use a variety of programming languages. They are
interested
in deploying Eclipse tools and the CDT internally, as well as investigate if
Eclipse could easily be used for their other programming languages. Ed
Burnette also brought
up the issue that the current CDT versioning is confusing for Eclipse users.

Macraigor builds emulators (JTAG/BDM) probes for a variety of processors.
They
have integration with gdb and are looking at leveraging that to provide
integration
with the CDT

Wasabi provides a commercial version of NetBSD. They are looking at Eclipse
and the CDT
as a possible development environment for NetBSD.


4. Project infrastructure

A couple of slides were presented on the updates to the project
infrastructure. See
slides 3-5 of the "cdt-plan-dec.ppt" PowerPoint file at:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/cdt-home/news/12-200
2/cdt-plan-dec.ppt?cvsroot=Tools_Project

Main discussion points include
the need to better communicate activities (which everyone involved in the
CDT will
have to make a conscious effort to do), as well as schedule monthly
conference calls.


5. Planning

Again, see the slide set called "cdt-plan-dec.ppt". Two main topics were
discussed, with
a brief refresher on the goals of the CDT as an introduction.

First, the proposal for a CDT 1.0.1 release was presented. The CDT 1.0.1
release is essentially
a maintenance release to address some issues with CDT 1.0 (bugfixes) as well
as round out
the feature set. The proposed timeframe is to have a 1.0.1 candidate by the
middle of
December, with a GA date by end of month. The 1.0.1 release would work with
Eclipse 2.0.2.
Interoperability with the 2.1 Eclipse stream will be investigated and if
possible, the CDT
team will make the 1.0.1 release work with 2.1.
Everyone seemed in agreement with the 1.0.1 scope and timelines.

We then discussed development plans for the next 6 months. On top of minor
feature 
enhancements and bugfixes, some areas generated a lot of discussion and
interest. These
include the builder, the CDOM/parser, target abstraction and launching, the
debugger,
Cygwin, UI usability issues, user documentation, testing and GNUDE. The
approach that 
the CDT has chosen to take is to form teams from the interested participants
in 
those areas, start some discussions and formulate the feature/development
plans 
for those subsystems. The goal is to have a preliminary plan of action at
the next 
conference call in January.

Participants on the call expressed interest in the various areas, as
follows:

Builder and build model team
Timesys
Phil (Redhat)
Chris (Tensilica)
Brian Moyle (Montavista)
Sean and Doug (Rational)
Alain and Dave (QNX)
Ed Burnette (SAS)


CDOM/parser team
Doug and John (Rational)
Alain (QNX)
Mark (Programming Research)
Tom (Redhat)
Sam (Timesys)

Target abstraction and launching team
Thomas (QNX)
Brian Moyle (Montavista)
Chris (Tensilica)
Sam (Timesys)
Tom (Redhat)
Martin (Rational)
Jim (Macraigor)

Debugger and GDB versioning
Mikhail and Alain (QNX)
Tom/Elena (Redhat) 

Cygwin and UI usability
TBD (Judy and Chris have expressed interest in the usability issues)


User documentation
Rational
Chris (Tensilica)
Brian (Montavista)
Thomas (QNX)
Redhat

Testing
QNX
Rational
Sam Robb (Timesys)
Tom (Redhat)

GNUDE (Linux/GNU development environment)
Phil (Redhat)
Tom (Redhat)
Timesys
Montavista
Wasabi

In most cases, I'll be looking for someone to drive those discussions (team
lead).
If you want to volunteer, please let me know; in some cases, someone's
already
driving those activities (e.g. Doug and John at Rational are working on
CDOM).
We probably will also create specific areas on the web site to outline the 
plans and progress in these specific areas.


6. Varia

A few more points were discussed during the meeting. 
This includes:
- the hurdles faced by new participants (ISV's) to the CDT, which have a
hard time
figuring out where to start in doing integration. The overall architecture
of the CDT
needs to be documented better, and we need a document that covers how ISV's
would
integrate with the CDT. Thomas volunteered to start such a document.
- the CDT should probably also publish some "how-to"'s on the common 
integration/extensions that ISV's want to do, e.g. how to launch with your
own version
of gdb, how to extend the builder and so on. This would probably go a long
way
in helping with CDT integration.
- It was also suggested that we ask folks to write "how-to's" for the CDT
(maybe we
could offer some free T-shirts as reward).


Again, I want to thank everyone for attending the call, and appreciate
everyone's
continued support.

Sebastien