Developer meeting: February 1, 2011

Held at:

• 09:00:00 a.m. Tuesday February 1, 2011 in America/Los_Angeles
• 12:00:00 p.m. Tuesday February 1, 2011 in Canada/Eastern
• 04:00:00 p.m. Tuesday February 1, 2011 in UTC

Last meeting: 2011-01-25

Meeting takes place on IRC on the #evergreen channel on Freenode. See the Calendar for specific dates and times.

• IRC logs
• Minutes will be supplied in this document after the meeting finishes

• Please fill out Who's who if you want to be identified more readily in the future

1. Determine the taker of minutes: Dan Scott
2. Determine meeting leader: Dan Scott
3. (10 min) Review Action Items from previous meeting
   1. Dan Scott to write release notes for OpenSRF 1.6.2
      • STATUS: Done - linked from downloads and 1.6 release notes (additions / corrections welcome)
   2. Mike Rylander to write release notes for Evergreen 1.6.1.5
      • STATUS: Deferred
   3. Dan Scott to provide some verbiage about the Security Mailing list on the mailing list page.
      • STATUS: Done
   4. James Fournie / SITKA to test 2.0 and report back
      • STATUS: Deferred
   5. Anoop Atre to setup a post-2.0 development wiki page to summarize ideas/discussions.
      • STATUS: In-progress, Anoop created a placeholder stub and will flesh out and post to the list
   6. Bill Erickson and Dan Wells volunteered to look at the handle_checkin_backdate bug (LP 684491)
      • ACTION: Dan Wells will backport to rel_1_6, rel_1_6_2, and rel_1_6_1
4. Continuous integration server update
   • Now running for OpenSRF trunk, rel_2_0, and rel_1_6 on Ubuntu Lucid x86_64 at http://testing.evergreen-ils.org (thanks to Equinox for the server!); basic configuration is in the OpenSRF trunk examples directory.
   • Call for build slave servers for Evergreen and OpenSRF testing on different distributions has turned up responses from UPEI, GPLS, and Equinox - awesome!
   • Added some basic unit tests to the Evergreen trunk Perl modules (do I load?)
   • TODO (volunteers welcome!):
     • Need to start getting those build slave servers provisioned and set up
     • Add packaging steps to automake infrastructure for OpenSRF and Evergreen (less process stuck inside people's heads, less chance for fumbling fingers, more automation possibilities)
     • Add more unit tests
       • ACTION: Galen Charlton volunteered to lead a test hackfest (testfest?), either before the Conference, to build up a set of unit tests
     • Add more static code checking (like pylint) - and correspondingly filter out some of the resulting noise
5. Google Summer of Code application:
   • The Google Summer of Code program “offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects” (paid for by Google). The project needs to provide mentors for the students - who may never have participated in an open source project before, so mentoring includes not just understanding the code base, but understanding IRC / mailing lists / version control / submitting patches etc - and the goal is for the students to contribute actual working code to the project.
   • Projects can apply beginning February 28th, 2011; application deadline is March 11; projects are notified about whether they're eligible on March 18th.
   • Putting together a good application requires some effort, but the pay-off could be high… not just for the code produced during the summer, but by getting one or more potential Evergreen developers in the community.
   • Ideas for possible projects include some of our post-2.0 planning topics (rewrite the OPAC (in fast, lightweight, buzzword-friendly HTML5?); move to Dojo 1.5+) or other community-benefiting possibilities (enable external authentication methods; rewrite Perl code in C; writing Ruby / PHP / other OpenSRF clients and pertinent Evergreen classes like Fieldmapper; adding OpenSRF-over-HTTP as an option to Perl / Python; …)
   • If we wrap up our Conservancy agreement before the application deadline, that might help simplify some of the financial details and avoid any questions about what organization needs to deal with that overhead.
   • Special guest Chris Cormack dropped by to discuss his experience as a Google Summer of Code mentor; in short, th timing doesn't work well for New Zealand because students are in school during North America's summer, and the bulk of the work is in the application and evaluation paperwork, but he recommended it as worthwhile for North Americans
     • Do we have available, willing, able mentors?
       • Dan Scott volunteered to mentor
       • Jeff Godin semi-volunteered to mentor, availability to be determined
     • Do we have volunteers to create an application?
       • Crickets
     • ACTION: Dan Scott to post a summary to the mailing list
6. Evergreen release status:
   1. 1.6.1.x (current release = 1.6.1.6)
      1. Bugs targeted to 1.6.1.7
      • Mike Rylander will cut the 1.6.1.7 release once the “backdate bug” is fixed
   2. 2.0
      1. Bugs targeted to 2.0.1
      2. 2.0.1 release - when?
         • ACTION: Mike Rylander will cut the 2.0.1 release hopefully on Thursday
         • ACTION: Mike Rylander will add the Evergreen release rolling steps to the wiki so that we can automate them (via automake or buildbot make steps, whatever it takes)
   3. 2.1: Mike Rylander proposed that we cut a 2.1 alpha release every two weeks, starting real soon now
      • Dan Scott seconded that motion and suggested we use a buildbot scheduler to automate that process for us (see previous item for dependency on automating release-cutting for Evergreen)
   4. Most recently reported bugs
7. (2 min) Schedule next meeting
   • Tuesday, February 8th at 12:00 EST, 9:00 PST