[news.eclipse.technology.alf] ALF Source Code Mangement Vocabulary Meeti

["Tim Buss" <t b u s s @ S e r e n a . c o m>]

ALF Source Code Management Vocabulary Meeting, Wednesday April 19th at
10:00AM PDT

Agenda

0. Last week's minutes (04-12-06)

1. Wikki update

2. Discuss milestone dates and who can do what.

3. Discuss Richard T's proposal (below)

4. Any other business

Attendees

Tim Buss - Serena

Brian Carrol - Serena

Jamey Clark - Serena

Eric Minick - Urban Code

Scott McGrath - Accurev

Richard Title - Accurev

Mark Phippard - Soft Landing

0. It was agreed that last week's minutes reflected that meeting except for
a name confusion - its Daniel Gross not Richard Gross (sorry Daniel)

1. Wikki update

We cannot use the eclipse provided wikki because it is open to committers
only We are investigating using the wikki prvided by Daniel Gross. I have
contacted Daniel to discuss some particulars. Mark P has added and SCM
document but we should regard this as experimental until I have confirmation
from Daniel. (ie please keep copies of anything you add to the wikki)

It was suggested that email concerning the ALF Vocabulary should generally
be sent via this mailing list (alf-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx)

2. Discuss milestone dates and who can do what.

Milestone dates for the SCM vocabulary effort were discussed and agreed to
be reasonable

Deliver the "Final" Use Case and Concepts document - June 30th

Deliver the "Final" Schema and WSDL - August 13st

Deliver Subversion and CVS example services - October 31st

Specific assignments so far are as follows:

Update Wikki with comments sent via email - Mark Phippard

Write an introduction to the SCM Vocabualry effort stating philosophy, goals
etc. - Scott McGrath

Produce the final Case and Concepts document - Richard Title

Implement the Subversion example service - Mark Phippard

It was suggested that we could divide the work by "use case" once we
established and agreed to one or two.

3. Discuss Richard T's proposal

The main discussion centered around the need for a "workspace" service to
isolate and standardize the file transfer aspect of SCM. To quote from an
email I sent previously on this subject.

"One other aspect that is not so far included in the list is the practical
aspect or what a "workspace" means in an ALF context. ALF operates, chiefly,
on the server side. This presents a number of difficulties that are outside
the norm of traditional SCM usage. In ALF it seem likley that we will want
to enable sharing a workspace between tools with ALF service flows being the
arbiter of access. We will also want to avoid flowing file content through
the BPEL engine.

This implies the need for a "workspace" service which may be either provided
by the SCM or be an independent service. This service would provide
locations to which files could be checked out to, made available to tools
and checked in from. The ALF service flow would use this service to allocate
a workspace and then delegate SCM commands that require file transfer
operations to that service. Ther service should provide a number of means to
allow remote access the workspace files (eg. File share, web service copy,
ftp stc.) so that tools may get either directly access or get a copy of the
files in the workspace."

There was general agreement on the need for such a service. The details need
to be worked out.

4. Other Business

It was suggested that we may want to enlarge the scope fo the SCM vocabualry
to include "Configuration management". The primary difference was in the
generality of the item being versioned; a source file, some other kind of
file, and abstract entity described by meta data. The general consensus was
that this might be a good idea but that it might not work well since we may
not have the subject matter expertise in areas beyond Source control. An
approach suggested was that we proceed assuming SCM and re-visit the more
general aspect once we are ready to design the schema/WSDL. Ways of
factoring that to provide a common base my present themselves at that time.

Action Items.

1. Try to confirm our use of the Wikki - Tim Buss 2. "Write an introduction
to the SCM Vocabualry effort stating philosophy, goals etc." - Scott McGrath
in the next couple of weeks 3. Pick a couple of use cases to fully flesh out
as examples. - Richard Title with assistence of others. (Note: This was not
explicilty agreed to but implied so I'm reaching - sorry Richard)

Tim Buss,

Serena Software Inc