[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>]

Meeting minutes for ALF Source Code Management Vocabulary Meeting, Wednesday
June 28th at 10:00AM PDT

Agenda

0. Last week's minutes (below)

1. Status on tasks (see list in minutes below)

2. Data model and Schema

3. Any other business

Attendees

Tim Buss

Eric Minick

Richard Title

Scott McGrath

0. Last weeks minutes were accepted. No additional comments were noted.

1. Tasks

Completed

T7. Discuss "Workspace"

T18

SCM metadata difference report schema.

We agreed to defer this for now as it does not seem to be a critical use
case. We will re-visit it in the future.

Todo

T11. Integration based use cases

We decided that this was being discussed extensively as part of the build
use case and that we can piggy back off that discussion. This will become
important once we have the proposed schema/WSDL since we will need to apply
the use case filter to determine if we have a reasonable definition (ie
useful but not overreaching)

T15.

Expand "primitive" use cases to include more detail (eg datatypes, method
signatures) Richard made some updates. Tim will check with Adam.

T16.

Update Data model based on ALF meeting feedback.

Brian sent out the updates. No one has had a chance to review to see of the
changes reflected our discussion.

T17.

Create a schema from the data model. Since the data model is in visio this
may need to be done by hand.

Tim started this. Various issues became evident (see discussion in "2. Data
Model and Schema" below) Tim will attempt to refine sufficiently to provide
an object for discussion by next week.

T19

Wikki pictures. There are some placeholders for pictures in the Wikki.

These need to be populated. In particular it would be good to get the
updated data model into the Wikki

T20 Add the notion of User to the concepts User is an important concept to
SCM since a primary function is to attribute changes to particular authors

T21. Refine the idea of "Revision Specification". Define the common use
cases.

There are several ways this could be expressed. For example:

A) as an opaque string to ALF

B) as a formal set of "objects" that can be related in some formal way

C) as an ALF defined "language string

D) some combination of above.

It seems that there are some common use cases (eg get "latest" from branch)
that should be defined explicitly by ALF but there are many other cases. It
seems unwise for ALF to attempt to define a fully generalized approach. For
this cases ALF should just allow the underlying tool to extend the ALF
services or provide tool specific services. We need to decide what cases
make sense for ALF to formally define.

2. Data model and Schema

In attempting to convert the Data model to a schema, some issues came up and
were discussed

A) objects vs ids. The data model currently implies a ser of nested
instances. In reality is seems more likely that the object instances will be
related by an ID and that unless we needed the object details we would
always refer to the object by ID. It seems likely that all SCM providers can
provide a form of ID for the objects the expose to ALF. It also seems likely
that we can assume that these IDs can be passed a strings and that the
actual content of the ID can be opaque to ALF. It was suggested that all
exposed objects should present a "display name" and a "unique identifier".
For some providers the value of these fields may be identical for any
particular instance. The assumption is that the "display name" is printable
and the that "unique identifier" can be used to identify and retrieve an
object instance.

B) Revision Specification (see discussion in T21 above)

3. Any other business - no other business was discussed

Tim Buss - Serena.