Re: [eclipse.org-planning-council] Planning Council meeting in ChicagoJu

["Thessin, Tyler" <tyler.thessin@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bjorn,

Sri will be covering for me (as I will be traveling) to represent TPTP and Intel.

A few tidbits re the agenda:
- I'd like to request addition of another topic, i.e., discussion of revision of the Eclipse Standard Charter.  Several of the early Eclipse projects adopted "custom" charters that were mostly similar, but contained slight variations as each attempted to slightly improve over versions existing for other projects available at the time.  Later, the Eclipse Standard Charter was defined which helped minimize effort to create a new charter and ensure more consistency (while still allowing projects to override anything in the standard charter if warranted).  

TPTP is one of the projects still using a "custom" charter and we would like to move to adopting the Standard Charter while helping improve the Standard Charter.  Toward this end, quite some time ago I submitted (to Bjorn) a long list of proposed improvements to the Standard Charter from which I believe all projects would benenfit and which would ease adoption by TPTP (i.e., minimize the need for special case overrides in the TPTP charter when adopting the Standard Charter).  

I propose that Bjorn assemble my proposals for review, request other feedback for changes, and create a version 1.1 draft of the Standard Charter for review by the PMCs.  Once the PMCs concur on the draft and their interest/ability to migrate thereto (from either their existing "custom" charter or the Standard Charter 1.0), we could take a bulk request to the Board to accept the updated Standard Charter version 1.1 and adoption thereof (i.e., charter changes, even though ever so slight changes) by respective PMCs.  Note, this update would not force updates of PMC charters based on the 1.0 version, both versions of the Standard Charter could co-exist (but the intent with 1.1 is to avoid introducing anything that would be objectionable and thus prevent upgrade for existing - or future - charters.  Perhaps the PC could discuss the merits of this proposal and define a possible timeline to execute.

- TPTP is planning to sync "dot" releases with the Platform based on the cycle this past year, we anticipated x.y.1 Sept 30 and x.y.2 Jan 30 in our future planning.

- Re Europa, given how fast the need to sync projects arises, I suspect we'd be better off defining as much as possible of the Europa release cycle specifics in this call vs. Oct.  Last year our first Callisto sync point occurred ~Nov 11 - much better to have a schedule planned well in advance vs. scrambling to align things retroactively..

- Similarly, last year we (the projects) committed to Callisto "blind" - i.e., we agreed to inclusion to Callisto without all of the conditions known up-front.  We wouldn't have decided otherwise if the conditions were known up-front (Callisto is good), but it would have caused fewer headaches in dealing with late-breaking requirements.  With Europa, we still won't know 100% up-front, but we can ever improve and at least state that which we know - with the least amount of ambiguity - to minimize the late-breaking issues.

- Perhaps with Europa, we should take another bold step toward excellence by taking a stronger stance toward cross-project compatibility (vs. just simultaneous release).  Possibly also to include an attempt to sync (or at least clarify) platform compatibility across projects (OSs, Archs, JVMs, etc.).

- Through the Callisto effort, we encountered numerous after-the-fact 3rd-party dependency conflicts (e.g., separate Eclipse projects dependent on different versions of a 3rd-party component).  These issues highlight the need for improvements in our processes and transparency for handling 3rd-party components (many of which have been requested previously - e.g., visibility of a cross-project listing of dependencies, better visibility into the queue of pending requests, proactive notification to projects dependent on 3rd-party dependency X, when one project requests approval of an upgrade to X, clear expectations regarding typical (and special case-e.g., crunch times around EclipseCon) turn-around time for EMO approvals to allow projects to plan accordingly, etc.).

- Discuss cross-council communication.  This generally applies to communication between Councils between the F2F sessions.  One approach is to expect that each project/company representative in each of the Councils keeps well informed their respective project/company associates (we try to do this by reports from our Council reps in our weekly PMC call).  Another approach is to simply cc each of the other Council mailing lists on mailings of minutes from each Council.  This would probably be relatively low noise and expedite cross communication.

Thanks,

..tyler

-----Original Message-----
From: eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx <eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: eclipse.org-planning-council <eclipse.org-planning-council@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wed Jun 07 20:31:28 2006
Subject: [eclipse.org-planning-council] Planning Council meeting in ChicagoJune 29th

Planning Council Members,
As you know, the Q2 council meetings are being held in Chicago at the Hotel Allegro (www.allegrochicago.com). The schedule will be:


*	Tuesday (June 27th) evening - Group dinner at at the 312 Chicago Restaurant. (Please RSVP via http://www.regonline.com/96095)
	
*	Wednesday (June 28th) morning - plenary session with all three Council and the entire Board
*	Thursday - planning council meeting

 	 Tuesday 27	 Wednesday 28	 Thursday 29	 
am	 Requirements	 Plenary w/ Board	 Planning	 
pm	 Architecture	 
eve	 Group Dinner	  	  	 

The agenda for the Planning Council is (to date) three items: 


*	Callisto. 
	You all are/will be done with Callisto on the 29th. However, we will still have a couple items to discuss:

	*	How/when to make the final "final bits" announcement.
	*	How are we going to handle dot releases? Are we going to have Callisto-dot releases or is each project just going to do their own? Will we use the same update site?
	*	Some retrospective on the Callisto experience - the good, the bad, and the we'll-be-better-next-time
		

	*	Europa.
	Callisto has been/will be a great success. We'll probably want to do this again next year. I've arbitrarily chosen "Europa" for next year's code name (because it's the next easiest to pronounce major moon of Jupiter :-). While we might not want to do all the planning for Europa at this meeting, I think we should at least "plan to make a plan" for Europa. We can talk a bit about the must/should rules, a bit about coordinating builds, synchronizing schedules, etc.
	
	*	EclipseCon.
	The program committee for EclipseCon 2007 will include you all. Basically, it just makes sense for the experts on each project (that's you) to choose the tutorials, long talks, short talks, and demos for that project. Each major Eclipse project PMC will be given a set of slots - you can recruit content, you can choose from submitted content, etc. Anyway, I'll explain the rationale for this and your role in the process. 

Look forward to seeing you there...
Bjorn

P.S. The next Council meetings will be in Stuttgart Oct 10-11-12 in conjunction with our first Eclipse Summit Europe.