| [birt-dev] Updated: Eclipse BIRT PMC Meeting Minutes - Monday, October 16, 2006 |
(Resend with two typos fixed - BIRT 2.1.2 is Feb 2007, and BIRT 2.2 is Jun 2007. Both had incorrectly stated 2008.)
Meeting
BIRT PMC, 10am Pacific, Monday, October 16, 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)
Larry Liang - BIRT PMC - InetSoft Technology Corporation (www.inetsoft.com)
Minutes
Meeting Logistics
Due to several PMC members attending Eclipse Summit, there was no PMC meeting last week (October 9, 2006).
BIRT 2.1.2 Planning
BIRT 2.1.2 is the second maintenance release in the BIRT 2.1 release series. This is a maintenance release to address critical bugs identified by the community. BIRT 2.1.1 is part of the Callisto coordinated maintenance release plan (see http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Callisto_Coordinated_Maintenance).
Tentative target date for the coordinated release is Feb 2007. From a BIRT project perspective, we aim to complete development by end of December. This will allow the development team to focus on BIRT 2.2 development.
For a list of bugs assigned to the release, refer to Bugzilla: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?classification=BIRT&target_milestone=2.1.2
BIRT 2.2 Planning
The next major release of BIRT is BIRT 2.2, scheduled for June 2007 as part of the Europa Simultaneous Release (http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Europa_Simultaneous_Release).
The draft BIRT 2.2 Development Plan has been published for review: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/project/project_plan_R2_2_0.php
BIRT 2.2 M1 build has been created and is available for community review. This should be released in the next day or so.
Jason will create a New and Notable document for M1.
BIRT 2.2 and Eclipse 3.2 Support
In order to support the community of developers using BIRT technology in products based on Eclipse 3.2, our goal is to support both Eclipse Platform 3.2 and 3.3. This is in recognition that many products/user communities that could benefit from BIRT 2.2 will be using Eclipse 3.2 as their platform for some time.
For this reason, BIRT 2.2 will support two stacks:
Eclipse 3.2 / Callisto technology stack
Eclipse 3.3 / Europa technology stack
To support this approach, the primary build environment for BIRT 2.2 will be Eclipse 3.2.
The development plan will be updated to reflect this.
In the event that BIRT 2.2 needs a critical Eclipse Platform 3.3 feature to support some capability, we may revisit this but for now our plan is to not introduce any dependencies on Eclipse Platform 3.3 or Europa features.
Eclipse Council Meetings Update
Wenfeng and Paul attended the Eclipse Council Meetings in Germany last week. Details of these meetings can be found in the EMO Minutes when they are published. Three items are of particular note for the BIRT project:
Development Process: The EMO are proposing some updates to the Eclipse Development Process. Bjorn has published a draft for review at: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Development_Process_2006_Revision. The BIRT PMC need to review this and give comment. We will discuss this at the BIRT PMC meeting on November 6. In the meantime, the PMC should review this document and prepare any feedback for discussion on Nov 6.
Europa Release Planning: There was considerable discussion on planning for the Europa Simultaneous Release. The BIRT PMC agrees that the BIRT project should be part of Europa and we are planning BIRT 2.2 with this objective. For details on Europa, see: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Europa_Simultaneous_Release.
UI Working Group: The UI Working Group (http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/User_Interface_Best_Practices_Working_Group) has proposed to add a UI Review as a formal step in the Release Review process. This would focus on whether the project has followed UI design guidelines. The planning council rejected this initial proposal since it places too much focus on UI consistency rather than potentially more impactful usability engineering improvements. The BIRT PMC agrees - while UI consistency is important, and updated cross-project UI guidelines would be very useful for the project, having detailed UI reviews as part the Release Review for every piece of UI is too burdensome. It should be up to the project to manage it’s UI development and conform to the UI guidelines (with community review and feedback).
Excel Emitter
An new Excel Emitter is one of the projects proposed for BIRT 2.2. One of the challenges with an Excel emitter is whether it should focus on delivering the data for the report, or whether it should try to mimic the look of the report in Excel. Based on the experience of the group in creating similar functionality for other products, the emphasis should be on data but with some formatting. In other words, users want the data in Excel and any formatting we include should not get in the way.
The team will be creating a BIRT Project Specification (BPS) for this and this will provide more specifics about what we plan in order to get community feedback.
BIRT Download Experience
For first time users downloading BIRT, we need to look at their user experience and see if we can improve this. We did not have time to get into this as part of this PMC call, but we discuss again next week.