[cdt-dev] Conference call minutes, April 3rd CDT call

[Sebastien Marineau <sebastien@xxxxxxx>]

CDT monthly conference call, held April 3rd 2003 at 11AM EST.


Present:


QNX
Sebastien Marineau
Mikhail Khodjanis
Judy Green
Alain Magloire
Thomas Fletcher

Redhat
Phil Muldon
Rick Mosley
Tom Tromey

Timesys
Samm Rob

Rational
Michel Paquet
Dave Daoust
Doug Schaefer
John Camelon
Andrew Niefer
Hoda Amer
Sean Evoy
Bogdan Gheorghe
Tanya de Sousa
Cory Bialowus
Martin Lescuyer



1. Update from participants

- QNX is putting out an update on Momentics 6.2.1 with the latest CDT 1.0.1
- New members have been added to the Rational CDT team
- Work is continuing at Redhat on Eclipse plugins for Linux development

2. Embedded systems conference BOF

Eclipse will be holding a birds of a feather session at the San Francisco
embedded systems conference (April 24th). We are looking for participants, 
as well as contributors to give 15 minutes technical presentations/demos 
at the BOF. (Subsequent to the call, Timesys indicated they would be 
participating and giving a quick talk/demo at the BOF). I'll be posting the
details to the list, and we hope many of you will be able to join us.


3. CDT 1.1 update

The discussion for the CDT 1.1 release centered around the core and debug
features,
as well as the timeline. It appears that we are on track with the build
model
prototype, as well as build model updates and parser. The new parser is
doing very
well, and received a lot of positive feedback. Rational also mentionned that
there
is work going on with the indexer; however, this is post-1.1. Alain will
sync
up with Rational on the indexer, as he was also looking at making some
updates
to it.

The debug work is on track, with all planned features commited. The debugger
works
with gdb 5.2.1 and 5.3. Montavista submitted a patch for "gdbserver" target
support;
it was decided that we would integrate this into the 1.1 release; Alain will
complete
that this week. Alain also made the comment that he tried a gcj-compiled
Java program,
and was able to debug it in the CDT debugger. Finally, Doug asked whether
any non-gdb
debugger had been implemented to validate the CDI interfaces. As far as we
know, none
has been implemented yet.

In terms of timeframes, those set at the last conference call still hold.
Feature
freeze is set for April 5th, with bugfixes for the remainder of the month,
with a GA
target of the 30th of April. To coincide with this, it was also suggested
that we 
provide an update on the web page highlighting the new features in CDT 1.1.
This
is to be discussed on the CDT mailing list; Judy will update the web content
for
the 1.1 release.


4. Core/Debug work beyond 1.1

Very little was discussed beyond the work already planned for CDT core and
debug. We
did set a target to make progress on the target model; Thomas Fletcher will
try to
move this forward with a proposal to the group by mid-May.


5. Switch to Eclipse 2.1 (feedback, issues)

The switch has been done, and has been quite seamless. There is still work
to be
done in the CDT code to remove warnings from deprecated interfaces, as well
as take
advantage of the new platform 2.1 features. This is ongoing work which will
be done
gradually. 

Thomas asked when the breakage was done, in case someone wanted to go back
to the 2.0-
compatible source. Alain will send the exact date when the switch was done.
It was also
mentionned that making the CDT source build with 2.0 is only a few lines of
change,
although the divergence will increase as we take advantage of the new 2.1
APIs.

 
6. Communication and infrastructure

There were very few comments on this; the mailing list are working out
pretty well, 
and face-to-face meeting have proven to be useful as well. The push to get
the CVS
infrastructure to generate automatic patches sent to mailing lists is still
on,
and may be helped as the platform team is also looking to do this.


7. Documentation/testing

Rational has taken the lead on a tutorial for CDT. Tanya asked that people
forward any topics 
or raw content to the cdt-doc mailing list. It was decided that the "what's
new" type of
info would be put on the web site, along with a possible section in the
docs. 


On the testing front, there has not been any progress on the UI automation
front. 
Tensilica's test group was doing an eval of different UI testing packages;
maybe
Chris Songer can email an update on this to the list.

As for host platform testing, Judy brough up the challenge with testing the
four
different supported hosts; we all agreed that we would revisit this after
the 1.1
release, to try and spread the load. Redhat proposed that they take on Linux
host testing.


8. Varia

CPPUnit was discussed again. Three main concerns with it have been
expressed:
the fact that the CPPUNit framework is LGPL, whether it is in fact the right
test
framework for C/C++, and the fact that the CPPUnit project itself has been
inactive
for almost a year.
As Rational is doing some work on CPPUnit, there is urgency in finding a
home for this
work. Michel and Sebastien will work with John Duimovich over the next week
or two to
get this resolved.

Alain also brought up questions on the activity with the 1.0.1 branch. It
was agreed that
we would stop updating it with bugfixes over the next week, with all efforts
now focussed
on 1.1.

Sam asked about mixed Java/C debugging. This has been discussed before as
one of the possible 
long-term direction for the CDT debugger, but no concrete work has been done
on this yet.


This is all I have, if I've forgotten anything or misquoted anyone, please
let me know!

Thanks,

Sebastien