[higgins-dev] Notes from 2/14/2008 Higgins Dev Call

["Paul Trevithick" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Attendees
=========
* Paula Austel - IBM
* Jeff Broberg CA
  Duane Buss - Novell
* Anthony Bussani - IBM Zurich
* Greg Byrd - NCSU/IBM
* Brian Carrol - Serena
* Tom Doman - Novell
* Andy Hodgkinson - Novell
  Valery Kokhan - Parity Ukraine
* David Kuehr-Mclaren - IBM
* Mike McIntosh - IBM
  Dale Olds - Novell
  Uppili Srinivasan - Oracle
* Drummond Reed - Cordance
* Bruce Rich - IBM
  Mary Ruddy - Parity/SocialPhysics
* Markus Sabedello - Parity
  Jim Sermersheim - Novell
* George Stanchev - Serena
  Daniel Sanders
* Paul Trevithick - Parity/SocialPhysics
* Brian Walker - Parity

Agenda
======
1) [Mary] Release Process
-------------------------
We had a successful release review yesterday. We are working on refining
draft press release, and organizing pre-briefings. We are also working on a
new version of the Eclipse Higgins website home page that looks more like
the Aperi project home page (see http://eclipse.org/aperi) 

2) [Brian] Release Build of 1.0.0
---------------------------------
Brian: PeterK is working on the branch. He will mark all plugins 1.0.0 as he
goes along

Andy: WRT the GTK&Cocoa Selector: For 1.0.0 the source code is avail and
buildable from SVN
 
Andy: Once 1.0.0 branch is created we could paste one-off builds (OSX & RPM
builds) as a stop gap solution until we figure out how to do nightly C++
builds on the Eclipse build servers. 

Paul: That would be great! Please do so.

3) [Paul] Project Plan 
----------------------
See http://wiki.eclipse.org/Beyond_Higgins_1.0  

Paul: As you can see I've moved away from 1.0.1M1, 1.0.1M2, etc. as we had
agreed at the F2F in Provo. Instead we will define 1.0.1, 1.0.2, as the next
few releases. 

4) [Paul] Higgins Downloads
---------------------------
Paul: see https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=218923. Clearly we
need to make a new/better plan for our downloads page. But I'd like to ask
advice from this group.

Mike: We are unlike every other Eclipse project. The only part that we have
that is remotely like what someone would expect is the RCP Selector --the
rest are downloaded parts to some bigger solution, web service, etc.

Mike: Perhaps the downloads page should have an initial sentence that
explains how we're different from what you'd expect. We're mostly not an
Eclipse IDE plugin. The RCP Selector is the most similar to what they
expect.

Mike: One thing I could do is rename the [RCP Selector] project to match the
wiki page. I will do it today.

Mike: For the RCP Selector we could provide a feature build: this would
allow us to distribute a self-contained version of the minimal RCP with the
plug-in. If we could then in an auto-build script we could build a complete
executable that would contain everything we need to run. In general we are
not doing a good job as an Eclipse project to explain how different: 

Mike: Most people will come to a project through the project pages, but you
can also get there through the main Eclipse downloads pages. And if you do
that, you'll be lost.

Misc
----
Drummond: Mike, has there been any progress on the ISIP-M extension
specification(s)? 

Mike: I'm hoping to get some time. Next by Thursday I hope.

Markus: By the way, XML2RFC is the tool we're using for formatting spex.
[There was a discussion of the difficulty of using XML for edit-tracing (vs.
say, Word). In the end we concluded we'd use XML2RFC to generate the HTML,
but then while we're still editing/reviewing the spex we'll also generate in
parallel a .doc file for editing tracing purposes. 

Markus: We've started working on some spex here:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Higgins_Specs 
- Higgins Identifiers
- Higgins Context Discovery
- etc.

-Paul