| [birt-dev] Eclipse BIRT PMC Meeting Minutes - Monday April 4th, 2005 |
Meeting
BIRT PMC, 11am Pacific, April 4th, 2005
Attendees
Wenfeng Li - BIRT PMC Lead - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Paul Clenahan - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Paul Rogers - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Scott Rosenbaum - BIRT PMC - Innovent Solutions (www.innoventsolutions.com)
Project Committers and Interest
IBM has joined as a Committer for the BIRT Charting Project. IBM's participation is specifically targeting extending the output from the chart component to include SVG. Welcome!
There is active participation and interest across Eclipse projects with BIRT. The BIRT team and TPTP team are working closely to allow BIRT reports to be used in TPTP. BIRT PMC is also engaged in discussions with DTP to determine how the projects can work together. There is clearly overlap between what BIRT needs in the data area and some of the discussions around what DTP might provide.
The PMC continues to be very interested in broadening the participation in BIRT and are looking for other potential Committers. We anticipate increased interest in this area as the community grows and BIRT 1.0 becomes a reality.
Community and Community Feedback
Community feedback has been strong and there is a lot of activity on the BIRT newsgroup. The BIRT team is answering questions as we go along and have managed to maintain a quick response time on questions.
Initial reaction from the newsgroup on how to deploy BIRT reports has indicated that we need to do a much better job in this area. We have posted additional information on how to do this, and are also making some project improvements in this area to make it easier.
How to develop data extensions also received feedback that it is harder than it needs to be so we are making improvements in this area for BIRT 1.0 as well.
The new "BIRT News" mailing list is a good way to keep the community informed about BIRT since it is more proactive than the BIRT web pages. We need to promote this more actively to the community as an option. Our goal would be to send only items that are of general interest and important. We don't want to send too much email to this or people will unsubscribe from the mailing list. We will also continue to publish all news on the What's New section of the BIRT site.
Process and Infrastructure
All the necessary Eclipse infrastructure is up and running for BIRT, and the project is using this. We have been building from the Eclipse CVS repository since late Feb.
We are currently building BIRT every night, and targeting an alternating Stable and Milestone Build approximately every two weeks in the lead up to BIRT 1.0.
BIRT mailing lists have been created. There is a general "BIRT News" mailing list and various development mailing lists for Committers. The full list can be seen at http://www.eclipse.org/mail/index.html. We are encouraging "How To" type questions to be answered on the newsgroup rather than any of the mailing lists.
Eclipse Licensing due diligence has been completed for all the BIRT components (both originally sourced from Actuate developers, and those from other open source initiatives). All BIRT components adhere to the Eclipse Public License.
Bugzilla is not currently being used by the core project team for all defects, although we are monitoring Bugzilla and addressing the community reported defects that come in through this channel. We want to move to Bugzilla, but are dependent on some additional fields being added in order to support the development process. We need to work with the EMO on this topic and expect to do so post-BIRT 1.0.
We have established a voting procedure for adding new Committers to a project. Following the general Eclipse process, all existing Committers in the project area must vote for the new Committer to be added. Following this process, we have added a Committer from IBM to the BIRT charting project.
BIRT Roadmap
As we approach BIRT 1.0, we are starting the planning process for post-BIRT 1.0. Tentative plan is to target BIRT 2.0 for late Dec, 2005. Plan is to work on a 6 week Milestone basis after BIRT 1.0. We are also considering the possibility of a 1.1 release and/or other intermediate releases between BIRT 1.0 and BIRT 2.0.
Eclipse 3.1 will be released after BIRT 1.0, so it is not possible for BIRT 1.0 to guarantee support for Eclipse 3.1. We are actively testing on Eclipse 3.1 now. If there are issues that prevent BIRT 1.0 working with the final Eclipse 3.1 release, this will further drive the need for a BIRT 1.1 release with support for Eclipse 3.1. The PMC want to ensure support for Eclipse 3.1 as quickly as possible after it is released so we will create a BIRT 1.1 release if needed.
Post 1.0 Themes are available to the community at http://www.eclipse.org/birt/index.php?page=project/summary_plan.html. We now need to start getting more concrete input and developing a plan for community review.
BIRT PMC Meeting Schedule
PMC agreed to meet quarterly on a scheduled basis, and ad hoc as needed. Meetings will be scheduled for 2nd Monday of each quarter at 11am Pacific. Next meeting:
Monday, July 11th at 11am Pacific.
Action Items
Paul Rogers will promote the BIRT News mailing list more prominently on the BIRT web pages.
Paul Clenahan will explicitly solicit community input on features for post BIRT 1.0.