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[technology-pmc] COSMOS Project review
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Technology PMC,
I've done my review of the COSMOS project. It is my assessment that the
project is progressing well. While I'd like to see more community
development, it does seem that the project already has a very diverse
group of committers, along with some commercial adoption. As I note
below, most of the commits are coming from IBM employees, but a steady
flow is also being registered by SAS and CA.
The project seems to be doing the right sort of things to help newcomers
familiarize themselves with the project. The website provides good help
and the developers appear to be responsive in the newsgroup. I'd like to
see more blogging along with more explicit outreach.
I am a little concerned about how the project is labeling their
releases. Their current naming scheme does not seem to conform to the
conventions that are being followed by most other projects. Though it
could just be that I don't understand what they're doing.
I have captured my research along with some of my thoughts below.
Wayne
--
Some activity on the newsgroup. There are some links in the newsgroup to
several articles and press releases that indicate that COSMOS is getting
some adoption. All open bug reports appear to come from committers or,
at least, from the project committers' colleagues. 147 downloads (as of
today) of the COSMOS SDK. I'm not sure what we can derive from this as
the downloads amount to a few here and there over a period of four
months. I believe that it is fair to say that the community is
relatively small.
The project does provide good documentation. Some parts seems more
extensive than others. Similarly, some parts seem more refined than
others. The point is that the project does seem to be providing the
information prospective adopters require.
The committers appear to come from a diverse group of companies. Most of
the commits are by IBM employees, but some recent activity has also been
recorded from CA and SAS. It'd be nice to see more diversity in the
actual commits.
Mailing list is quite active. Meeting minutes are posted. Development
does appear to be very transparent and open.
Project plan [1] is not yet in the standard format. Plan includes a
section with a "needs to be updated" section that should probably be
updated.
The IP Log [2] appears complete.
I don't understand the strategy that the project is using to label
releases. The current downloads are labeled "1.0.0", but releases are
named "Iteration 12", "Iteration 13", and "Iteration 14". Where does the
1.0.0 come from. They mustn't have released a 1.0.0 as they are still in
incubation. I believe that candidate builds should be labeled as such.
Our convention is to name milestones M1, M2, ..., so I expect to see
releases labeled "1.0.0M1", etc.
The downloads page [3] contains a invalid link to "build types" [4]
which I expect describes the different kinds of builds. This broken link
needs to be fixed. The download page doesn't format well on my system
(Ubuntu 7.10 + Firefox 2).
Does the COSMOS project have a blog? I can't find it.
I get a broken link (500, could be temporary) off the home page from the
link from "CA, IBM First to Demonstrate CMDB Federation,
Interoperability" [5]. That needs to be fixed.
[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Cosmos_Release_Plan
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/projects/ip_log.php?projectid=technology.cosmos
[3] http://www.eclipse.org/cosmos/downloads/
[4] http://www.eclipse.org/cosmos/downloads/build_types.html[\
[5]
http://article.wn.com/view/2008/09/08/CA_IBM_First_to_Demonstrate_CMDB_Federation_Interoperability/
