| [birt-dev] Eclipse BIRT PMC Meeting Minutes - Monday, May 15, 2006 |
Meeting
BIRT PMC, 10am Pacific, Monday, May 15, 2006
Attendees
Wenfeng Li - BIRT PMC Lead - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Paul Clenahan - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Scott Rosenbaum - BIRT PMC - Innovent Solutions (www.innoventsolutions.com)
Jason Weathersby - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Mike Fox - BIRT PMC - IBM Corporation (www.ibm.com)
Minutes
BIRT 2.1 Update
BIRT 2.1 RC3 is planned for this Friday, May 19th.
BIRT 2.1 continues to track with the Callisto Simultaneous Release schedule (see http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Callisto_Plan_Summary for details).
As always, see Bugzilla for information on what is in BIRT 2.1 RC3. You can also see the plan for the BIRT 2.1 release, including convenient links to the Bugzilla queries, at http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/project/plan.php.
BIRT 2.1 Release Review
BIRT 2.1 Release Review conference call will be part of the overall Callisto Release Review. We are in the process of preparing 3 BIRT specific slides for this conference call. These will be send to the BIRT PMC for review today or tomorrow.
In addition, we are working on a more comprehensive BIRT 2.1 Release Review presentation that will be posted on the BIRT web pages prior to the release.
3rd Party Software Update
To improve the download and install process for BIRT 2.1, we have submitted prototype.js for approval by the EMO to be included in the BIRT downloads from www.eclipse.org. If this is approved, users will not need to download and install this component separately.
Our goal is to improve the download/install experience by also including iText. This is more involved and we are working through the process to get to the point where iText can also be included.
BIRT 2.1.1 Planning
As previously indicated via PMC minutes, we aim to have a BIRT 2.1.1 release, tentatively scheduled to sync with the Eclipse Platform 3.2.1 release. No detailed planning has commenced yet.
Process for New BIRT Project Contributions
We are pleased to report that the BIRT PMC has been approached by another software vendor who would like to contribute to the BIRT project. To support this initiative, the PMC discussed the process under which a new contributor might get started in the project. In this case, the vendor is not already an Eclipse Committer, so we have outlined the process below appropriately. If the vendor/person was already a Committer, the process would be different.
The process to get them engaged will be:
1. New contributor develops a proposal a submits this to the PMC
2. The PMC and existing BIRT contributors review the proposal
3. New contributor provides some level of commitment to the PMC and state how many committers they ultimately see being involved.
4. Assuming these initial steps are successful, the PMC gives initial provisional approval for the new contribution.
5. The proposal is posted on the BIRT Wiki pages for community review, and a Bugzilla entry is created to track comments and feedback.
6. New contributor develops a high level project plan for review
7. In parallel and as a good faith offer, we grant the new contributor a temporary "observer" status on the BIRT PMC (assuming it makes sense for them to ultimately be part of the PMC).
8. In parallel, and in the spirit of meritocracy that is a key element of the Eclipse Community, the new contributor makes initial contributions by fixing BIRT bugs in Bugzilla and attaching the patches to the bugzilla entries (since they will not have committer status). These will then be reviewed by a BIRT Committer and, if acceptable, checked into the code base. This allows the new contributor to gain familiarity with the code base and work towards becoming part of the BIRT community.
9. Assuming bug fixing goes well, an existing contributor nominate at least one individual from the new contributor to be a committer after 10+ fixes have been submitted. Additional committers could be nominated once the project is underway.
10. Once the new contributor attains committer status, they contribute the new code (which they will hopefully have been developing in parallel according to their high level project plan).
11. The new contributor has now become part of the Eclipse Community
BIRT @ Eclipse Forum Europe
Jason was at Eclipse Forum Europe last week in Wiesbaden, Germany - http://eclipseforumeurope.com/. He gave a talk on BIRT and an helped staff the Actuate sponsored BIRT booth.
Conference was very busy with 1700 attendees at the event. The BIRT talk was very popular -- standing room only even after the organizers brought in extra chairs. The estimate was 200+ people at the BIRT talk.
BIRT Events
The following upcoming events will include talks on BIRT and/or Actuate sponsored BIRT booths:
IBM Rational Software Development Conference on June 4-8 - Orlando, FL - http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/events/rsdc2006/ - One talk.
Building Data Centric RCP Applications Webinar on June 5. BIRT will be a component of this Eclipse hosted webinar. Registration page should be available on Eclipse.org by the end of this week.
Actuate International User Conference on Aug 21-23 - Agenda TBD but will include talks on BIRT.