Eclipse Planning Council Minutes
October 11, Esslingen, Germany
| Present | Regrets | |
| Sri Doddapaneni, Intel, TPTP | no data | |
| Doug Schaefer, QNX, Tools | ||
| Stefan Daume, Scapa | ||
| Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Eclipse | ||
| Doug Gaff, Wind River, DSDP | ||
| John Graham, Sybase, DTP | ||
| Rich Gronback, Borland | ||
| John Kellerman, IBM, Platform | ||
| Mika Hoikkala, Nokia | ||
| Yossi Leon, Zend | ||
| Wenfeng Li, Actuate, BIRT | ||
| Ed Merks, IBM, Modeling | ||
| Paul Styles, Compuware | ||
| Tim Wagner, BEA, WTP | ||
| David Williams, IBM | ||
| Oisin Hurley, IONA, STP |
Minutes / Discussion Items
(these notes are in logical rather than chronological order)
Public Mailing List Archives
The Planning Council agrees that the eclipse.org-planning-council@eclipse.org mailing list should be archived and the archives open to the public.
New Development Process
Everyone on the Council is reminded to read and comment on the new development process wiki page.
Build Workshop Report
The Planning Council was pleased with the outcome of the Europa Build Workshop. It was suggested that we might want to hold more of this kind of workshop in the future. Bjorn pointed to the CPAN community testing infrastructure as possible next workshop; others likened it to SETI@HOME for Eclipse testing.
The Planning Council would also be pleased to see an Eclipse project to provide a formal home for some of these build tools as long as that project is not "the Platform releng team supporting everyone else". A project for cross-project build (and other) infrastructure would be useful.
ACTION: [Bjorn FB] Suggest a next workshop to the Council.
Next Simultaneous Release Name
At Bjorn's suggestion, in order to avoid the chaos that he always seems to invoke around choosing a name, Tim suggests that we consider Io as next year's name. There was general nodding around the table.
UI Best Practices Working Group Report
This report was somewhat hampered by the fact that it was delivered in written form rather than in person. Thus when the council had questions, there was nobody who could really answer them. The biggest problem was that we were unsure what the implications were; we didn't want to mandate an unknown set of requirements. We were also worried that a release review check was too late in the process to affect change in this release - at best it could generate bugs for the next release.
Another issue we discussed is "what is usability?" The discussion centered around the fact that real usability is not the usual red flag items (duplicate menu items, ugly icons, etc), but more the lack of integration and lack of features. We felt that perhaps the UI Best Practices were aiming at the surface problems and not the deeper usability problems.
A third problem is that most projects do not have a "UI Lead" and since the UI Best Practices talked about a UI Lead, we were not sure how that was going to work.
We recommend the following to the working group:
- Focus on the Europa milestones. Review each milestone and provide feedback as we go. For example, the top ten UI glitches per milestone. Input instead of meta-input.
- Attend the next planning council conference call to provide a report in person.
ACTION: [UI Best Practices Group] Attend next conference call.
Europa Planning
Europa is the simultaneous release of a number of projects plus some update manager improvements plus (perhaps) adopting some of the UI Best Practices.
ACTION: [All] Read, comment on, and be prepared to discuss the rules for inclusion in Europa as posted on the wiki.
A few other notes:
- We need a package management working group. Bjorn's notes are not clear on what this is.
- After Europa, perhaps do some usability studies in anticipation of Io planning.
We need a central coordinator. David filled that role for Callisto but is unable (and should not be asked) to do so again for Europa. The call for volunteers from the Planning Council was met with a telling silence. The Council believes that this a role that should be staffed by the Foundation.
ACTION: [Bjorn FB] Pass this request for an EMO-staffed central coordinator on to Mike.
Wiki
As a side note, people asked for instructions on how to upload non-image files to the wiki.
- Click on the "Upload file" link on the left menu; follow the instructions to upload the file.
- During that process, you will specific that the file is named Foo.doc (or something).
- Go to your wiki page and enter text referring to that file and the URL to that file. For example: "Here is the document I wrote about how to upload files [https://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Image:Foo.doc]."
More and more of the project web pages are being moved to the wiki. The one thing that is stopping us from more pages on the wiki is dynamic content support.
ACTION: [Bjorn FB] Enter a bug to allow dynamic content in the wiki.
Europa Milestone Dates
Will we finalize the dates during our next conference call. We plan to dynamically reduce the +1/+2 schedules as much as possible - as soon as the builds are completed and tested, the milestone will be marked complete.
ACTION: [Kevin H] Confirm that the wiki milestone dates work for the Platform.
Planning Calls
Calls will be Wednesdays, 7am PT, 10 ET, 4pm CET, 5pm IT. The schedule of the calls is posted on the wiki page.
Notes taken and posted by Bjorn Freeman-Benson