[udig-devel] uDig at location meeting and assorted other admin stuff

[Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

TLDR: Jody is alive. We have some organisation here and a bit of work to do (but the Eclipse Foundation seems to be ready to help out on the hard part). Please join the Eclipse Location Working group (even if just to lurk).

Jody

Still the question holds: who is going to start the process of getting

uDig to eclipse. I think we would need to have at least a couple of

members of the communtiy to assure presence and contribution. Did I

loose another email thread?

Perhaps - We did start the process in December :-) However it is going a bit slow as we need to ask eclipse to be comfortable with us using LGPL license libraries (JTS and GeoTools). We can probably get an exception for that by demonstrating how valuable they are and that we don't have the capacity to rewrite them…

Other then that I think we are waiting to hear back from Andrew and Andrew is waiting to hear back from us.

I am keen to start :-) As such I would like to fill in our RFC and get a good list of tasks going to capture the work involved so we can start to round up resources.

The page is here (is this what you missed?):

- http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Eclipse+Foundation

On a separate topic - I would like to see uDig taking part in the eclipse "location" working group; however to date all the meetings have been at 3am for me. I would like to ask that someone else from the uDig community attend these (or we can ask Andrew to hold two meetings and cary the minuets over between them).

Andrew has a bit of a balancing act as representative of both Eclipse and OSGeo Foundations. To be fair so do I since I the OSGeo incubation chair. We can muddle along; but just a reminder to play nice as we all have the same goals. 

We have also failed to contact Refractions (although we have asked Emily to check in with Refractions Management). Andrew you may wish to use Emily as a useful Refractions contact until we can arrange a better introduction - she is CCed on this email.

Other things in the mix:

- I would not mind changing the uDig license to EPL 1.0 to simplify our license story. Our reasons for not using the license were only based on the popularity of LGPL at the time (and the eclipse common license at the time was not yet established as a viable investment target).

- We have a smooth working relationship with GeoTools (a policy of copying code over when possible to share. We would need to amend this to cover a license transition from EPL->LGPL perhaps a formal letter in our docs would work. GeoServer has a similar arrangement (ask on the email list and get approval) for the much harder GPL->LGPL transition so we have working policy model to crib from.

- We are getting very fond of git; and github in particular. While I don't mind continuing to persue github pages I would like to focus on static content hosting; so we can take our docs with us and not get tied into their fun little content theme scrubber thing. Eclipse now has some procedures in place with respect to git. While github documentation has been a key success factor for the project - that limit is less damaging as git becomes the defacto technology. More damaging is the "if it is not on github the project must be canceled" attitude that has already caused trouble for GeoTools and GeoServer :-)

Sure everybody can join. I am not afraid of the fact that too many

people would help. It is the other way round :)

So if such a process is started, I think there should be a minimum

number of developers that donate time to that process. Else I am just

wondering who would do the work.

I am very keen; I want to talk with Andrew and determine how much work there is and boil it down into tasks before asking the project to accept the RFC proposal. 

This thought comes from the fact that when uDig needs to be released

and tested, very very few people are around.

The automated maven / tycho build is helping a lot with this :-) Indeed I think that is one of the most amazing things the Eclipse Foundation has done recently.

I would like some help on the release cycle front - as it cuts out my time to work on QA and new ideas. 

Well, the move towards

eclipse looks way bigger to me than that, and without some

coordination I am just wondering how that should work?

We have a small bit of coordination already started; thus far there have been only two "common" concerns.

- After being on the incubation committee I was concerned about the review processing being a lot of work - strangely enough this appears to be the part where the eclipse foundation is ready to step in and help (yay!)

- The eclipse foundation has a "1.0 release" from a fresh codebase policy which apparently is often a cause of contention. Since we lost our history moving to gitourious we are rather relaxed about this one.

Jody