The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Agenda November 15, 2006 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 (Pacific) and was begun when a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the Chair at 10:02. The meeting was held by teleconference, hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent: US Number : 800-531-3250 International : 303-928-2693 IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Ken Coar Justin Erenkrantz Dirk-Willem van Gulik (arrived 10:07) Jim Jagielski Sam Ruby Cliff Schmidt Greg Stein Sander Striker Henri Yandell Directors Absent: none Guests: Geir Magnusson Jr. Stefano Mazzocchi Sander Temme 3. Minutes from previous meetings Minutes (in Subversion) are found under the URL: https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/board/ A. The meeting of October 25, 2006 See: board_minutes_2006_10_25.txt Approval of the minutes were tabled for the next meeting. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Nothing to report for the short time since our last meeting. B. President [Sander] Infrastructure is back to business 'as usual'. Services were restored. Final accounting was done on the colo move. Justin has the expenses incurred. C. Treasurer [Justin] The SoC payment Jim received last month has now been received in our account and is reflected below. Per the email sent earlier this week, the cost of the co-lo move from UL to OSL is currently $3,188.70. We have discontinued payments to UL. Due to some mixups with the vendors, my personal credit card was charged for some of these items ($714.11 in total). Given Jim and Sander's recent approval via email, I will be reimbursed for those charges. In the last few weeks, we've had a number of 'chargeback' incidents with PayPal. These seem to be cases where credit card fraud may have been used and the scammers donated money to us. The fact that there's been so many in the last few weeks is sort of disturbing. We should keep an eye on this, but there's not much that we can do here. We have not yet received the Google payment for the sponsorship program, but should receive it in the next month. We're also still awaiting a firm committment from Covalent as to what level they will donate at. A few other companies have expressed interest in the program, but we have not yet received any other payments. I would also like to upgrade us to QuickBooks 2007. We're currently using QB 2005. Due to some upcoming personal changes, I need to migrate my main QB setup to another computer. So, I'd like to take this opportunity to upgrade QB as well. The new "non-profit" version claims to better support 990 forms. If true, that's really nice and would be a huge time saver. It's $399.95 online (downloadable from Intuit). Current balances (as of 11/14/2006): Paypal $ 563.73 (-$ 348.82) Checking $ 17,048.99 (+$ 15,720.45) Savings $190,972.12 (-$ 9,507.91) Total $208,584.84 (+$ 5,863.72) Jim volunteered to contact Covalent regarding their Sponsorship level. D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] Working in continuing on scanning all of our documents. All incoming iCLAs, CCLAs and grants get immediately recorded and scanned, with previously recorded documents getting scanned in a priority order. At present, all ASF membership applications have been scanned and are ready to be committed. I have created an Infra request to create a new 'documents' directory under the private repo, which will be used to locate all scanned documents. The secretarial assistant reported entering and scanning thirty-three new ICLAs, three CCLAs, one consultant services agreement, and four license agreements. The remainder of the membership application were completed in October, and several previously entered license grants were scanned. The ASF incorporation documents are also in process. The October Board Minutes were written based on our conversation and my notes. All approved minutes have been moved to the records section of the site repository. A proposal to hold an irc-based members meeting was floated to the membership. Out of a membership base of ~200 people, there was very little feedback. Because of what appears to be a lack of desire or need to have one, plus the proximity to the holiday season as well as work schedules, we will postpone the meeting and see if the start of 2007 looks any better. We have recieved no correspondence requiring board attention. E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff] Cliff reported that work is continuing on the "crypto export" clarifications for use within the ASF. Also being worked on is the standards licensing. Cliff noted that SenderID is covered under the Open Specification promise, and therefore removes any restrictions on use. F. VP of JCP [Geir] Geir reported that there were no issues within the JCP requiring board attention at this time. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache Ant Project [Conor MacNeill / Justin] See Attachment A Greg asked why Gump was not viable regarding the nightly builds. Greg was to follow up on this issue. Approved by General Consent. B. Apache Cocoon Project [Reinhard Poetz / Henri] See Attachment B Justin expressed his hope that the use of the term "Flashy" in the report did not imply Macromedia Flash. His concern was that accessibility should be a priority for all of our sites. Justin also noted that regarding Daisy, there has been some conversations between infra@ and Cocoon about the wisdom of running production services in the zone. Also, Spring is under the ALv2, so no license worries there. Henri noted that Rhino just relicensed under a joint MPL/GPL style, which is great news for a lot of projects at the ASF. Greg agreed but reminded everyone that no ASF projects can depend on GPL libraries. Approved by General Consent. C. Apache Forrest Project [David Crossley / Dirk] See Attachment C Approved by General Consent. D. Apache HiveMind Project [James Carman / Sam] See Attachment D Henri suggested that Sam chat with James about release management, just to make sure they and Tapestry are looking good. Sam agreed to take that action item Approved by General Consent. E. Apache HTTP Server Project [Roy T. Fielding / Greg] See Attachment E Approved by General Consent. F. Apache Java Community Process Project [Geir Magnusson Jr. / Sander] See Attachment F Report given during 'VP of JCP' Officer's report, above. G. Apache Lenya Project [Gregor J. Rothfuss / Cliff] See Attachment G Approved by General Consent. H. Apache Logging Project [Curt Arnold / Jim] See Attachment H Henri asked whether the Logging PMC was correct in avoiding to look at LOGBack, to avoid "contamination" of codebase IP. Cliff will follow up with them about this; this might be overly sensitive. Greg suggested that they simply should just ask permission from Ceki if he considers their review of LOGBack a possible contamination. Cliff also noted that the terms "very quiet mailing list" and "ending incubation" seem to imply "closing down" the project (some sort of hibernation). Greg noted that Incubator projects should almost never have separate user/dev mailing lists, unless they're mature code bases arriving with a large community. Approved by General Consent. I. Apache Perl Project [Geoffrey Young / Greg] See Attachment I Justin asked if Fred was added to the PMC or just granted commit. He will follow up. Approved by General Consent. J. Public Relations Committee [Jim Jagielski] See Attachment J Approved by General Consent. K. Apache Santuario Project [Berin Lautenbach / Sam] See Attachment K Jim noted, regarding JuiCE project and others, that they refer to some sort of "hibernation" option for podlings even though we have no such thing. Justin noted that basically hibernation is the same as retiring, or, at least, should be. Henri repeated the board's position that several podlings appear to be "hibernating" already, by being very dormant. Sam will talk to Berin and suggest he go to general@incubator to discuss the next phase for the podling. Approved by General Consent. L. Apache Velocity Project [Henning Schmiedehausen / Cliff] See Attachment L Approved by General Consent. M. Apache Xalan Project [Brian Minchau / Dirk] See Attachment M Approved by General Consent. N. Apache Xerces Project [Gareth Reakes / Sander] See Attachment N Justin asked if there was a license or s/w grant on file from Lucian Holland. Jim noted that we have an iCLA on file for him, but not a grant or CCLA. Approved by General Consent. O. Apache XML Project [Gianugo Rabellino / Justin] See Attachment O Approved by General Consent. P. Apache XML Graphics Project [Jeremias Maerki / Henri] See Attachment P Approved by General Consent. Q. Apache Incubator Project [Noel Bergman / Justin] See Attachment Q Jim wondered if we had any problems regarding Wicket and the lack of iCLA's from some developer who did not move over with the codebase. Henri asked if stdcxx be a worry. His concerns are that it's been 18 months in the incubator and that 5 of its committers have never been active. He also wondered what was meant by the phrase that Synapse has a 'diversity factor 3'. Approved by General Consent. R. Apache Maven Project [Jason van Zyl / Ken] See Attachment R Justin noted that we don't have any resolutions yet on the 2 issues the Maven PMC wishes to bring to board attention. It was noted that regarding the trademark issue, the PMC should contact the PRC directly. Jim took the action item to facilitate that. Approved by General Consent. S. Conferences Committee [Ken Coar] No reported submitted in time for review. T. Apache Geronimo Project [Ken Coar] See Attachment T Jim was curious on how "old" the report really was, and whether it included any Late Oct./Early Nov. news. Ken reported that it, in fact, did. Approved by General Consent. U. Apache Shale Project [Craig McClanahan] See Attachment U Approved by General Consent. V. Apache Harmony Project [Geir Magnusson Jr.] See Attachment V Approved by General Consent. 6. Special Orders A. Reestablishing the Apache Public Relations Committee WHEREAS, The Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to establish an ASF Board Committee charged with handling public relations, managing the Apache brand and image, performing outreach and announcements, and raising funds as necessary tasks to sustain the operation of the Foundation and assist the creation and maintenance of open-source software for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that an ASF Board Committee, to be known as the "Public Relations Committee", be and hereby is reestablished pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Public Relations Committee be and hereby is responsible for organization and oversight of efforts to handle public relations on behalf of The Apache Software Foundation, including trademark licensing and other issues regarding management of the Apache brand and raising of funds, but excluding the ApacheCon conferences (which shall remain a responsibility of the Apache Conference Planning Committee); and be it further RESOLVED, that Jim Jagielski shall serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the Public Relations Committee and have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Public Relations Committee; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the members of the Public Relations Committee: Shane Curcuru Lars Eilebrecht Justin Erenkrantz Jim Jagielski Alex Karasulu Geir Magnusson Jr. Ted Leung Yoav Shapira Cliff Skolnick Susan Wu Special Order 6A, Reestablishing the Apache Public Relations Committee, was approved by Unanimous Vote. B. Establishing the Apache Labs project WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of innovation labs where committers of the foundation can experiment with new ideas without the burden of community building; and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors believes that innovation is a powerful and necessary resource to promote and maintain inside the foundation; and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors understands that research efforts are intrinsically associated with a higher mortality rate that don't match the already established incubation and development practices. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as Apache Labs, be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that Apache Labs be and hereby is responsible for the maintenance and oversight of topic-oriented innovation labs for foundation committers to use; and be it further RESOLVED, that Apache Labs is responsible for promoting innovation without discrimination of purpose, medium or implementation technology; and be it further RESOLVED, that Apache Labs is responsible for regularly evaluating labs under its purview and making the determination in each case of whether the lab should be terminated, continue to receive support and oversight, or proposed to the incubator as seed for a new project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of Vice President, Apache Labs be and hereby is created, the person holding such office to serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the Labs PMC, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache Labs PMC; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Apache Labs PMC: * Stefano Mazzocchi * Santiago Gala * Yoav Shapira * Gregor Rothfuss * J Aaron Farr * Brett Porter * Leo Simons * Bertrand Delacretaz * Reinhard Poetz * Henri Yandell * Garrett Rooney * Ted Leung * Erik Abele * Sander Temme * Martin Cooper * Jukka Zitting * Niall Pemberton * Graham Leggett * Scott Sanders * Noel J. Bergman * Geir Magnusson Jr * Danny Angus NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Stefano Mazzocchi be appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Labs, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed; and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Labs PMC will be governed by the bylaws attached to this proposal, and that it will continue to maintain and adapt such bylaws to maximize its goals and minimize eventual negative impact on the rest of the foundation. See Attachment W for the Apache Labs Bylaws Special Order 6B, Establishing the Apache Labs project, was approved by Unanimous Vote. C. Appointing a new chair for Apache Geronimo WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Ken Coar to the office of Vice President, Apache Geronimo, and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation of Ken Coar from the office of Vice President, Apache Geronimo, and WHEREAS, the Project Management Committee of the Apache Geronimo project has chosen by vote to recommend Matt Hogstrom as the successor to the post; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Ken Coar is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of Vice President, Apache Geronimo, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Matt Hogstrom be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Geronimo, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 6C, Appointing a new chair for Apache Geronimo, was approved by Unanimous Vote. 7. Discussion Items None. 8. Unfinished Business None. 9. New Business 10. Review of Current Action Items Greg: ask Ant about Gump for nightlies and why it isn't feasible. Sam: release management for HiveMind. Greg: talk to Noel about user/dev mailing lists for podlings concerns. Greg: clarification from Perl regarding Fred's status. Sam: talk to Santuario about the podling. Sander: find out about s/w grant from Lucian Holland for Xerces. Jim: redirect Maven to the PRC regarding trademark request. Greg: rename agenda item #10 to "Review of Previous Month's Action Items". 11. Announcements None. 12. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 12:00 (Pacific). Adjourned at 10:54. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache Ant Project o Current Release The current release remains Ant 1.6.5 which was released on June 2, 2005. There have been no releases finalized since the previous board report. o Ant 1.7 Ant 1.7 has been through a number of beta releases. A release candidate for the final 1.7 release is now available (13-Nov-2006). o Antlibs The Ant project has released version 1.0 of a .NET Antlib which supports .NET related development activities and tools. It works with both Microsoft's and the mono project's tools. A beta of the AntUnit 1.0 antlib has been released. This antlib contains tasks for testing Ant tasks without needing to use JUnit directly. o Development Activities The Ant project is currently considering issues which have arisen from the Ant 1.7 release preparations including: - procedures for management and validation of releases - how to handle tasks which support commercial tools and require the tool's libraries to be present for the task to be built. Examples include the Weblogic and Starteam tasks. Overall Ant will be moving to isolating such dependencies in Antlibs. - Resuming Ant nightly builds. In the past Ant nightlies were produced by the Gump project but this is not considered viable any more. There has been a lot of work on outstanding bugs as part of the release cycle which is good to see. o Ivy Project The Ant PMC has sponsored the Ivy project in the ASF incubator. The Ant Project is happy to manage Ivy once it has been through incubation but also recognizes that the board and/or Ivy may deem it more appropriate to have Ivy as a TLP once incubation is complete. A number of Ant PMC members are acting as mentors. o Legal Issues I noted the appearance of the Gosling project which makes use of some Ant source code but which does not include a NOTICE file at this time. We have not yet contacted the Gosling project about this, but we do not expect there to be an issue. o Community I think everyone is happy to see an Ant 1.7 release. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Cocoon Project RELEASES / ONGOING WORK - There were no releases, neither from the 2.1.x branch nor from trunk. - We plan to release a second milestone release of Cocoon core 2.2 and of some blocks in November. Additionally we aim to release Cocoon 2.1.10 by the end of the year. - Finally we have a working version of Cocoon blocks in trunk. After that we consider Cocoon core in trunk being feature complete. - The work on using OSGi as fundament (aka Cocoon 3.0) is "on hold" for now. The reason is that the Spring community is working on an OSGi/Spring integration layer which will save us a lot of work (www.springframework.org/osgi). - As soon as 2.2 is released, we will only apply bug fixes and minor enhancements to the 2.1.x branch. This means that there will be no hard rule to keep it in sync with trunk anymore. - There is a new documentation system in place. It is based around the Daisy CMS, a Maven 2 plugin that pulls out the content and SVN. Although we use the CMS, we will still add our generated docs to SVN before we publish them. (see http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/cdocs/1201.html) - There are plans to come up with a new, flashy design for cocoon.apache.org. COMMUNITY - From October, 2nd to October, 4th the 5th annual Cocoon GetTogether took place, this year in Amsterdam. Thanks to Arje Cahn and his team at Hippo, it was a success again. There were 91 attendees from 13 different countries (http://www.cocoongt.org/chairs-big.png) and 13 interesting talks (http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/GT2006Notes). - new committers: Lars Trieloff - new PMC members: Andreas Hochsteger, Ard Schrijvers, Helma van der Linden, Lars Trieloff LEGAL - We use the new license headers throughout our codebase. - Cameron McCormack (Batik) asked the Rhino team about relicensing Rhino under the MPL: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine/browse_thread/thread/012b1279e97d1f8a/76511e91e6263eca#dcb9a0e6ee1eaed1 - Joe Schaefer made us aware that the IP Agreement at the Daisy registration (Daisy is our CMS) doesn't follow the Apache Community Contribution Agreement (http://www.apache.org/licenses/proposed/community.txt) which hasn't been adopted by the board though, but would definitly be an improvement compared to the current text. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Forrest Project Issues needing board attention ------------------------------ None. Changes in the PMC membership ----------------------------- New committer/PMC member Sjur Moshagen (sjur). General status -------------- Progress has been slower this quarter. Most devs seem busy with other stuff. Some new developers are participating on the mailing lists. Seems to be a bit more activity on the user list. Committers and other developers are assisting there. Issues still to be dealt with by the Forrest PMC ------------------------------------------------ Continue our project guidelines document. Been making links to various dev email discussions about how to deal with new development and when to branch. Need to get that into words. No progress since last report. Continue the discussion about our use of IRC (monthly sessions been on hold). Progress of the project ----------------------- Discussed the architecture of the framework, especially in relation to how we use Cocoon. Needs more exploration. No release date has yet been set for 0.8 but we are continuing the phase of trimming the list of scheduled issues, so the release is likely to be soon. That is what we said in the last three board reports, but yes we are making some progress. ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache HiveMind Project The HiveMind team is working on the architecture for HiveMind 2.0. The HiveMind TLP move is finally finished. Thanks to all who helped us (actually me; I'm still learning) in the process. We are also in the process of cutting a 1.1.2 release. I believe we are going to switch to a new release strategy, much like what Tapestry is doing. Basically, we cut a release, but don't declare it "official" until we have a vote on it. That's my understanding at least. Does this go along with what the rest of Apache does? ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache HTTP Server Project The Apache HTTP server project has had a relatively quiet quarter, with more time spent on ApacheCon and infrastructure moves than on the source code. We have no board-level issues at this time. In the last three months, we have added Graham Dumpleton to the PMC and Ian Holsman has resigned to focus on other things. We started a wiki at for documentation and it seems to have attracted interest in the area of documenting configuration related instructions for integrating third-party products with Apache httpd. We should be encouraging packagers to use that space as well. The HTTP server project is currently responsible for HTTP Server PMC | |-- httpd | |-- 1.3.x (maint-only) | |-- 2.0.x (maint-only) | |-- 2.2.x (active, several committers) | |-- trunk (active, many committers) | `-- win32-msi (active, one committer) | |-- httpd-docs (active, several committers) | |-- httpd-*/docs | |-- httpd.apache.org | `-- wiki.apache.org/httpd/ | |-- apreq (active, several committers) | |-- mod_arm4 (dormant, one committer) | |-- mod_bw (dormant, one GSoC) | |-- mod_cache_requester (dormant, one GSoC) | |-- mod_mbox (active, three committers) | |-- mod_pop3 (dormant, zero committers) | |-- mod_python (active, four committers) | |-- mod_smtpd (dormant, one GSoC) | `-- test |-- flood (dormant, two committers) |-- perl-framework (active) `-- specweb99 (dormant, one committer) Incubator | `-- mod_ftp (active, 1-3 committers) There have been no releases of any of our products since August, though builds of httpd 2.2.x, mod_python 3.3, and libapreq seem to be in progress this week. There are a few things we need to do fairly soon. First, we need to clean up the above mess -- there should be a distinction between release-ready products and various experiments, and mod_python could survive as its own TLP. Second, we need to find a way to lower the commit barrier for experiments and decide where to park the dormant ones. Finally, we need to open the doors to rethinking the entire server framework for httpd 3.0, with the potential for multiple competing alternatives and a serious bake-off. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Java Community Process Project ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Lenya Project The Lenya project added two new committers in the last period, Joern Nettingsmeier and Renaud Richardet. There were no new releases in the period. A maintenance release 1.2.5 has been proposed though for the next week. The codebase saw some nice enhancements in the period: * unified resource handling * flowscript integration simplified * continued switching to UUID for content No legal issues at this time. ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Apache Logging Project Overall ---------- * No activity. Changes to project bylaws to reorganize as a single project with multiple products should be considered in next quarter. Curt Arnold (PMC Chair) and Ron Grabowski (log4net committer) attended ApacheCON US. log4cxx Report -------------- * log4cxx status is essentially unchanged since last report. An initial ASF release of log4cxx is long overdue. There only some minor bug fixes this quarter and there still needs to be a coordinated sprint to address the few remaining issues that have been blocking a release. The user community remains healthy, but development has been resource starved. log4j Report ------------ * log4j 1.2.14 was released on 18 September 2006. This release added concurrency issues and addressed many minor bugs that had built up since development had shifted to log4j 1.3 branch several years ago. * A log4j 1.3 alpha was expected in this period, but no release candidate was produced. * Community discussion around a new appender that would address use cases such as distinct log files per thread. A sandbox effort was started for potential inclusion in log4j, but has not progressed to a usuable state. * There is an unclear migration path from log4j 1.2. log4j 1.2 is widely deployed more users are encountering concurrency issues and limitations which have been in the code for a long time, some of which can not be resolved without breaking compatibility. The log4j 1.3 development effort did not address these issues but broke compatibility in other areas in a manner inconsistent with a minor release designation. Most development effort in the last 18 months have been to eliminate unnecessary compatibility breakages in log4j 1.3. There has been discussion, but little more, about starting a log4j 2.0 development effort to target the concurrency defects and target current JDK's. In addition, Ceki Gulcu has been promoting migration to LOGBack (http://logback.qos.ch/index.html), a LGPL licensed logging framework. However given the terms of the LGPL license, it is risky for log4j developers to review the LOGBack code due to possibly contaminating log4j which makes it difficult to respond to LOGBack advocacy on the mailing lists. log4net Report -------------- * The log4net project is still in incubation, but likely time to make an exit which will hopefully be accomplished by the next report. * No scheduled work apart from bug fixing and evaluating contributed patches at the moment. * We have an open ended discussion on the use and storage of strong name assembly signing keys. This may need further discussion at wider level, and probably requires some sort of consensus amongst all the .NET projects. log4php Report -------------- * No report available from log4php committers in time for this report. The mailing list have been very quiet with only 4 messages on the user list and no messages on the development list. Likely time to consider ending incubation and finding a permanent resting place. ----------------------------------------- Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Perl Project -- mod_perl 1.0 -- The mod_perl 1.x is a maintenance track designed to work with httpd 1.3.x. Nothing much happening on that track. No new mod_perl 1.x releases since the last report. --- mod_perl 2.0 -- mod_perl 2.X is designed to work with all httpd 2.X branches. no new mod_perl 2.x releases since the last report --- Apache-Test -- Apache-Test provides a framework which allows module writers to write test suites than can query a running mod_perl enabled server. It is used by mod_perl, httpd and several third party applications, and includes support for Apache modules written in C, mod_perl, PHP and Parrot. no new Apache-Test releases since the last report --- Apache-SizeLimt -- Apache-SizeLimit is a popular component in most mod_perl production environments. no new Apache-SizeLimit releases since the last report -- Development -- mod_perl continues to be an active and healthy development community - bugs are found, bugs are fixed, development moves forward as usual. as of this report, we are in the middle of a release cycle, so all subprojects should have new releases by the next report. -- Users -- The mod_perl users list is, as always, thriving. nothing noteworthy has happened since the last report. -- PMC -- Fred Moyer joined the ranks as full committer to all the mod_perl source repositories. as always, it's nice to grow our community with good, talented people. ----------------------------------------- Attachment J: Status report for the Public Relations Committee Status report for the Public Relations Committee The PRC is making the transition to the new chair, which was approved by the board last month. There has been discussion on the PRC list regarding ways and methods of better tracking PRC open issues. Potential methods include: JIRA: The issue is that there are some non-ASF members who have admin view privs on JIRA; it is generally accepted that the PRC deals with sensitive issues and at the very most, ONLY ASF members should have view access. Whether this can be worked around is being investigated. Wiki: Investigation into ACL viewing capability is also being done, for similar reasons as detailed in the JIRA section. SVN: A PRC area under the private foundation repo is likely the leading candidate. All ASF members will have view access, and whether write access should be limited to PRC members is being discussed Mailing List: Jim proposed separating the singular prc@ list into 2: one which would deal with "policy" discussions, etc and the other that would have traffic focused on open issues and day-to- day operations. The reason, according to Jim, was to allow a better avenue for the PRC to track and follow action items via a list with a better signal/noise ratio. Heated debate about this; some people did not like the idea at all, others were confused about the idea (due to misleading names for the lists) and others had no problem with it (as long as they were open to all ASF members). Working is progressing on adding the Sponsorship program to the ASF website, most likely as its own page and line-item (on the main site). PRC and board members are relaying to the PRC contact information for potential sponsors. New members are expected to be voted in at this months board meeting; additionally, non-active members are expected to be removed, but with the gratitude of the PRC. IBM had a potential PR for the UIMA podling. After ensuring that the PR would not be released until the podling had reached the stage that allowed branding, feedback was sent to IBM. IBM has postponed the PR. Ted Leung working with Michael Goulde, of Forrester Research, on Michael's Open Source report on the ASF with a specific focus on SOA projects and podlings. Ongoing Items: - Logo Policy Guide (Susie) Susie has a initial draft, which is looking great. This should help us with a lot of the mundane stuff that PRC handles, waiting for feedback from people before it progresses - PRC Toolkit proposal from David Reid. (for handling press releases and things like that) ----------------------------------------- Attachment K: Status report for the Apache Santuario Project Work for the past quarter has been concentrated on the two libraries rather than any infrastructure level stuff. The C++ library had a 1.3 release and is now looking to release 1.3.1 with an updated build system and some minor bug fixes. The Java library is very close to a 1.4 release, having cut a set of release candidates. Some last minute API compatibility issues have held up the release, but it is now expected in the next week or so. On the JuiCE project (within the Incubator), nobody has had any time to focus on it, so we are considering "hibernating" it until such time as somebody has the required bandwidth. ----------------------------------------- Attachment L: Status report for the Apache Velocity Project Velocity Top Level move ----------------------- The Velocity project is excited about its move out from the Jakarta umbrella and onto top-level status. The board decided to establish the Apache Velocity project on Oct 25th and appointed Henning Schmiedehausen (henning@apache.org) as Vice President, Velocity and chair of the Velocity PMC. Ever since then, we have started to migrate our web site, mailing lists and repositories out of the Jakarta umbrella. With help from the infrastructure team, we currently have moved all mailing lists onto velocity.apache.org, created the private@ and general@ lists and started migrating the web site (we already have velocity.apache.org but it is currently redirecting to the jakarta site). We hope to finish the migration until the end of November. General information ------------------- Some talk with the Click project (click.sf.net), which is a framework centered around Velocity, has taken place to bring Click through the incubator into the Velocity project. There has been enthusiasm on the Click side and from us, but we have not taken any steps yet, because we wanted to let the dust from the top level move settle first. Velocity Engine project ----------------------- The 'velocity' project has been renamed the 'Velocity Engine project' a while ago. What is commonly known as "Velocity" is actually the templating engine. The Velocity Engine team is pushing heavily towards the 1.5 release. We have released one beta and will be releasing our second (and hopefully last) beta this week (we already voted on it). We expect an RC until the end of November and plan for a final release very early Q1 2007 (both Will and Henning attended Sally's PR talk @ ApacheCon US and we tried to understand the value of good release timing). We also plan sort of a "mini PR campaign" similar to the press releases issued at AC US. We will get in contact with the PRC once the RC is out. The code base itself has seen a steady progression; we were able to triage and sort all of the issue reports in JIRA and prioritize them nicely. The number of open issues is steadily going down so we expect the 1.5 release to be the best Velocity release ever. There has been work on a docbook based Documentation (User Guide, Developers Guide), which in turn has spawned a docbook framework which might usable outside Velocity as a general purpose documentation framework. Velocity Tools project ---------------------- Velocity Tools is working through a short backlog of patch contributions and bugs hoping to get a 1.3 version released before Velocity Engine 1.5 goes final. It's also the plan to test VelocityStruts 1.3 against Struts 1.3 for compatibility. Velocity Tools 1.3 is likely to be the last major release in the 1.x line, as the development team already started planning for version 2. Velocity DVSL ------------- There were no changes on the DVSL code base in the last few months. DVSL currently has no active developers, but we do apply the odd patch. All issue reports against DVSL were triaged and checked but there are no immediate plans to do a DVSL release unless one of the contributors steps up or strong desire for a release is shown on the user list. ----------------------------------------- Attachment M: Status report for the Apache Xalan Project Xalan-C ======= Nothing to report. Just bug fixes. Xalan-J ======= The Xalan PMC has passed three motions in the last quarter: 1. Have a new point release, Xalan-J 2.7.1 (the previous 2.7.0 release was in August 2005) 2. Drop support for running on JRE 1.1.x (no tears there) in 2.7.1 and beyond 3. Accept a code contribution from Xerces through Neil Delima a Xerces committer (THANKS NEIL!) to support serialization with DOM Level 3 APIs in 2.7.1 Xalan-J developers agreed on a date for the 2.7.1 release, and we are aiming for November 27, 2006. Dropping support for JRE 1.1.x means that Xalan can now use newer JRE library classes and apply a number of suggested patches. Xerces has noticed that Xalan's Java based serializer has been generally faster and of better quality than Xerces' serializer although Xalan's serializer was originally based on Xerces' serializer. Xerces is in the XML parsing business, not the XML producing business, so it makes sense to have a common serializer, and lack of support for DOM Level 3 APIs was the final thing that was holding Xerces back from using Xalan's serializer. ----------------------------------------- Attachment N: Status report for the Apache Xerces Project Xerces-J ======== In September we released Xerces-J 2.8.1 to roll up all of the bug fixes and minor improvements since the previous release. Work on the StAX implementation continues. In October we received a generous contribution from Lucian Holland containing an initial implementation of the StAX Event API along with several test cases. Since 2.8.1 we've also been working on the Xalan based DOM Level 3 serializer. This was just recently completed and contributed to Xalan-J. We've already migrated to it in SVN which clears the way for deprecating Xerces' native serializer in Xerces 2.9.0. There's been some discussion with the Xalan community about coordinating this release with the upcoming Xalan 2.7.1. If this were to happen it would probably occur later this month, shortly before the Xalan release. XML Commons =========== The Xerces PMC and committers recently voted to accept the transfer of XML Commons from the XML project to Xerces. In September the community agreed on a plan to have three releases of the XML Commons components: xml-commons-external-1.2.06 (JAXP 1.2) xml-commons-external-1.3.04 (JAXP 1.3) xml-commons-resolver-1_2 (XML Catalogs v1.1). It's been far too long since XML Commons had a release of these components. There are still a few odds and ends left but they are almost ready to go. Xerces-C / P =========== Xerces-P is now within Xerces-C. This means it is kept up to date as code changes and we have a very useful testing tool. Perl tests have now been written that cover the majority of the API. The new build system still needs testing on more platforms before the next release. We have had a code submission for XInclude but it still needs some work and we need to make a decision on whether to postpone this release or leave it until next. ----------------------------------------- Attachment O: Status report for the Apache XML Project General business: ============== As usual, things are quiet in the XML project. Generally speaking, it's worth noting that the process of moving XML projects to different PMC has started, with the recent vote that moved XML Commons under the Xerces umbrella. During the next quarter we expect to move Xindice to DB and Axkit to Perl. Other than that, no news to report. Xindice: ======= Xindice user's list is quiet, as usual, but there is some BugZilla and SVN activity on the developer's list. As bug list shrinks, possibility for the next release increases. AxKit: ===== AxKit2 development is going well, but has stalled while the developers concentrate on "real life" for a bit. People are developing apps for it and using it. We intend to do one more release of AxKit1 to fix a few niggling bugs. ----------------------------------------- Attachment P: Status report for the Apache XML Graphics Project Not much going on on the project level. XML Graphics Commons A version 1.1 is soon to be released in preparation of the next FOP release. Batik Most work was on bugfixing. Planning for a new release has started. The Rhino project has been asked to relicense under the MPL 1.1 which should solve the problem with the license policy. They said, they'll look into it (Nov 3). FOP There were improvements in the font area, for page-number-citation and the bitmap renderers. It was also encouraging to receive patches from new contributors, including a patch for CMYK support. One new committer: Vincent Hennebert (he was one of the GSoC students) The 0.93 release is still to be done. ----------------------------------------- Attachment S: Status report for the Apache Incubator Project The Incubator continues to be very active. The recent graduation of Harmony has led to a healthy discussion of what types of votes should be held on which mailing lists. Ken Coar also conducted a general review of the STATUS files for current Incubator projects, which has led to a number of those files being updated, and a general awareness that there had been some laxity in maintaining them. Robert Burrell Donkin continues to yeoman work helping to review the IP status for our projects. His RAT tool can help to automate some of the preliminaries, and perhaps we should look at encouraging its use ASF-wide. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Reports === Abdera === Abdera is an implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol and Atom Syndication Format. Items to complete before graduation: * Continue to expand the community * Handle any legal issues related to crypto code Community: * Added Ugo Cei as a committer/PPMC member * Decided to work towards a new release Real Soon Now (tm) Code: * Added new code that implements IRI support * Tweaked extension API to improve code reuse across parser implementations * Implemented more unit tests * Added more extensions * Added experimental bidirectional character support === IVY === Ivy is a new incubator podling. Functionally, Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies. It is characterized by the following: 1. flexibility and configurability 2. tight integration with Apache Ant Xavier Hanin, the main author of Ivy, sent the proposal to join the incubator on October 23d 2006. The proposal is sponsored by the Ant PMC which voted to sponsor the entry of Ivy at the Apache Incubator. Since the proposal, the main actions which have been achieved have been: * creation of the web page http://incubator.apache.org/projects/ivy.html * creation of ivy specific mailing lists * the CLA of Xavier Hanin has been received by the ASF * the CLA of Maarten Coene and the License Grant have not been received or processed yet. The receipt and processing of the License Grant is now the limiting factor for the next steps, which are the import of the codebase in Subversion and the import of the bug reports in JIRA. The people involved with Ivy at present are : ===== Mentors ===== * Antoine Levy-Lambert * Stephane Bailliez * Steve Loughran * Stefan Bodewig ===== Committers ===== * Xavier Hanin * Maarten Coene === Lokahi === Lokahi is a management console for Apache httpd and Apache Tomcat. Lokahi entered incubation in January 2006. Top items to resolve before graduation: * Grow the community. It's currently diverse, but fairly small. * Go through the release process at least once, issuing Apache-approved release and making sure all requirements, e.g. LICENSE and NOTICE files, are met. The Lokahi project has kept on chugging along, incorporating numerous contributed patches and focusing on code quality, improved MySQL support, and and enhanced support for late version Tomcat 5.5 containers. === Roller === Roller 3.0 work complete - We reported on the new featues of Roller 3.0 in the last status report. Roller 3.0 is now in production at several sites and is ready for release. We are currently testing RC4 and hoping to release shortly. Roller 3.1 nearing completion, RC1 sometime in the next week - features include: - Full support for tagging weblog entries, displaying a tag cloud, viewing blog pages by tag and providing dynamic RSS/Atom feeds based on tags. - Theme encapsulation: when you customize a theme the resources are now copied into your file upload area - making custom themes independent so they won't break when new versions of themes are deployed. - Replaced RTE editor with more sophisticated Xinha WYSIWYG editor Ready for graduation? - our licensing issues are behind us. We no longer ship any LGPL components and three separate effort exist to replace our Hibernate dependency with a non LGPL solution (using JDO, JPA and iBatis). Apparently, all we need to do to graduate is to build up our web presence within the incubator and migrate our bug database. Community building efforts - Earlier efforts are bearing fruit: IBM Is now contributing regularly to development via committer Elias Torres, who implemented weblog entry tagging support in Roller 3.1. Dave Johnson presented is Roller "primer for new users and contributors" talk at ApacheCon US 2006 in Austin, TX. === Solr === Solr is a Lucene based search server supporting XML/HTTP APIs, faceted search, highlighting, caching and replication. Solr entered incubation in January 2006. Top items to resolve before graduation: * Go through the process of making a release * Continue building a diverse community Community * Solr continues to see increased adoption and very positive feedback and contributions from a growing community: 195 solr-user subscribers and 95 solr-dev. * Patches from 10 different non-CNET contributors have been committed. * ApacheCon US 2006: "Faceted Searching with Apache Solr" session, Solr incubator talk, Lucene BOF * Other Presentations like "Subversion and Solr - Your Next Content Repository?" and "Solr and Faceted Search" * Integration packages (such as acts_as_solr maintained by others at rubyforge) Code * New built-in simple faceted search capabilities without the need for custom code. * Output XML via XSL transformer, compressed fields, improved parameter handling, more querying options and performance optimizations. === stdcxx === Stdcxx status report for the calendar quarter ending in 11/2006. Project Summary: Stdcxx is a portable implementation of the C++ Standard Library conforming to the ISO/IEC 14882 international standard for C++. In incubation since: 5/19/2005. Issues to resolve before graduation: Increase committer base and diversity. Community: The project has 11 committers (excluding mentors). Of these 6 have been (or were at some point) active. The diversity of the committer community is 54%. During the last three months the stdcxx community has added one new committer, Andrew Black. Activity: The stdcxx-dev list has 52 subscribers and averages 4.79 post per day since inception. The stdcxx-user list has 33 subscribers with a mean of 0.34 posts per day since inception. The stdcxx-commits list has 15 subscribers and 2.09 posts per day. There are 301 issues in the stdcxx bug tracking database. Of these 120 are closed or resolved. Code The most recent release of stdcxx, version 4.1.3, was published in January 2006. The next release, tentatively numbered 4.2, is expected to be published in the March 2007 timeframe. All code is licensed under the Apache license version 2. === Synapse === Accepted into the Incubator August 2005. Synapse is a robust, lightweight implementation of a highly scalable and distributed service mediation framework based on Web services specifications We are making good progress on these three issues: 1. Increase mailing list discussions - mailing list discussions up significantly 2. Growth of community - getting some good input from users. There was a good session at ApacheCon, and also 3 sessions on Synapse at the Colorado Software Summit with good attendance and feedback at all three. 3. Diversity of committers - we have diversity factor 3 currently and patches/contributions from at least two others Synapse development continues apace, have agreed a release plan for a 0.90 release and are working to get that out in the near future. There has been some discussion with the Jakarta HttpComponents people to use their upcoming NIO and async http code within Synapse (post the 0.90 release). In October a new committer, Ruwan Linton, was voted in. A Synapse blog has been started and there have been presentations at Apachecon US and at the Colorado Software Summit. === Tuscany === Tuscany provides infrastructure for developing service-oriented applications. Tuscany is still focusing on community building. We added four new committers, Venkat Krishnan, Luciano Resende, Ignacio Silva-Lepe and Rajith Attapattu. We also have others actively contributing, particularly in the areas of Declarative DAS, BPEL, JMS, SCA Policy and OSGi integration. In addition, we have had a lot of development activity: * C++ M2 was released * DAS M2 release candidate was submitted to the IPMC for vote and is currently underway * A SDO M2 release candidate was submitted to the IMPMC for vote and is currently underway * A Java M2 release candidate is currently being worked on and will hopefully be submitted soon to the IPMC for vote Our top two issues to resolve are: 1. Increasing community diversity. A significant number of committers work for one vendor. We are making efforts to attract individual contributors in addition to normal avenues (helping on lists with questions, etc.) including presenting at conferences (ApacheCon) and webinars. 2. Preparation for graduation needs to start including a discussion of what timeframe is appropriate === UIMA === Accepted into the Incubator 10/06. UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such as text, audio and video. There was some discussion on incubator-general about changing the name of the project to something that's not an acronym and does not have a history outside of Apache. The final consensus though was that the arguments for keeping the name outweighed the ones for changing, so we're sticking with it. After the naming discussion was settled, we started getting the infrastructure set up: * Mailing lists set up * SVN repository created * Apache, SVN, Jira accounts for committers (mostly done) * Initial code drop checked in after receipt of software grant, Apache license headers inserted * Initial version of website created Our priorities for the next few weeks: * Finish infrastructure set up, get settled in with Apache * Work on our (maven2) build * Work on our website, document our build etc. * Start directing our existing user base to Apache to attract some early adopters * Discuss ways to attract new committers === Wicket === Web development framework focusing on pure OO coding, making the creation of new components very easy. Wicket entered the incubator in October 2006. ==== October report ==== Top three items to resolve - * Remove a LGPL date picker component from Wicket-extensions * Work out how community is going to manage releases (e.g should we release current maintenance branches at SourceForge? 1.2.3->SF, 1.3->ASF, 2.0->ASF) * Settle into ASF context more Community aspects: * All bar one of Wicket's SourceForge committers have come over to Apache * About to vote in our first new committer since starting incubation * PPMC is starting to explore setting up project guidelines, for example should committer votes be done in private/public; should all committers be on PPMC or not) Code aspects: * Working on completing 1.2.3 release - last release to be done at SourceForge - before 1.3 development starts. 1.3 likely an ASF release * Work continues steadily on 2.0, also expected to be an ASF release Licensing: * Need to remove/resolve a LGPL dependency in Wicket-extensions on a date picker component Infrastructure: * All ICLAs are signed, all accounts created, and all karma granted (still need to get ICLA from one chap who didn't come to ASF, and for other contributors that may need one) * Subversion repository successfully imported into ASF repo by Garrett Rooney (many thanks). All development work is now taking place in ASF repo. * dev, private and commits email lists moved to incubator. All development work is happening on these lists * user list remains on SourceForge for the time being (while development settles in. May move over to ASF once we've done a real ASF release). * Wicket Wiki ( http://www.wicket-wiki.org.uk/wiki/index.php) has been ported across to Confluence ( http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/) * JIRA has been set up and bugtracking is now happening there. A SourceForge->JIRA importer has been written, but not yet executed on Wicket issues. ==== November report ==== Top three items to resolve * Remove a LGPL date picker component from Wicket-extensions * Make the code base license policy compliant * Settle into ASF context more Community aspects: * Voted in our first new committer since starting incubation: Alistair Maw * Development list gets more activity Code aspects: * Performed Wicket 1.2.3 release at sourceforge.net * Work on 1.3 has started * Work continues steadily on 2.0 * 1.3 and 2.0 are marked Apache releases Licensing: * Started work on removing/replacing LGPL date picker component from extensions * Started to replace License headers in source files * Discussion on css/javascript/html file license headers. Wicket contains and distributes many (small) css, javascript and html files that are also downloaded to the browser. Point of dispute is the fact that the license is larger than several of the files, and that it increases the download sizes of resources for all users of Wicket applications. Infrastructure: * Work has started to generate the website using confluence === XAP === XAP is a declarative framework for building, deploying and maintaining Ajax-based rich internet applications with the goal of dramatically simplifying Ajax application development. XAP entered incubation in May 2006. Top three items to resolve before graduation: * Bring the codebase to a level that contributors can make contributions without significant pain; * Create a XAP incubating release with proper packaging and quality * Engage a higher level of community activity and contribution Community * Various discussions on the XAP dev list on technical issues such as application initialization and DOM model; * Attended ApacheCon and gave a lightening talk on XAP * A session called "Introduction to XAP" was presented at AjaxWorld Conference and Ajax Experience conference at Boston * Various third party expressed interest in learning more about XAP, but complained that not easy to get infomation and not easy to figure out what XAP code does. Code * Achieved milestone 3: added more widgets and streamlined initialization * Various bug submission and JS unit tests submitted by Trevor Oldak * Update demo applications with improved performance * Working towards the next milestone: more widgets and some appealing demos to attract more developers ----------------------------------------- Attachment R: Status report for the Apache Maven Project Things are going well with the Maven project, but we have noticed that we are have noticed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to absorb user submitted patches. As a result we have opened up a part of the Maven SVN for all Apache committers where they can contribute in a more effective way. Managing patches has become overwhelming so we are encouraging people to work in the Maven sandbox where it is easier for us to integrate contributor works. Over the last quarter we have moved Maven's central repository from Ibibilio to a machine hosted by Contegix. As part of this move two proposals are outstanding for the board and I hope to get to them before the end of the month so that they can be voted on during the next board meeting. They are: - A proposal is still pending for the board on the use of the Maven trademark at maven.org - A proposal is still pending for the inclusion of Contegix as part of the official Apache infrastructure We are currently voting for a logo for the Archiva subproject, which is of a similar style to the existing logos. New Projects ---------------------- No new projects have been started or imported, but we have recently started a discussion about bringing the NMaven project from SourceForge over to the Maven project. NMaven deals with the specifics of Maven and .NET. New PMC Member ---------------------- We have added Jesse McConnell and Joakim Erdfelt to the Maven PMC. New Committers ---------------------- We have add Dan Fabulich as a committer on Maven and the Maven plugins. We have created a special group for documentation/site committers. Wendy Smoak has been added as a site committer. Henri Yandell has been added as an Archiva committer. Releases ---------------------- We have had numerous releases of plugins, but no major releases of Maven itself. Maven 2.0.5 will come out shortly, Maven 2.1 is in the works for early January, a beta of Archiva and Continuum 1.1 will also be out shortly. ----------------------------------------- Attachment S: Status report for the Conferences Committee ----------------------------------------- Attachment T: Status report for the Apache Geronimo Project Below is the belated Geronimo report for October, collected and collated by Matt Hogstrom. Geronimo Project - October 2006 Board Report JUGs and Conferences - - JUGs * Atlanta Matt Hogstrom * Virginia Paul McMahan * RTP Trangle Users Group Kevan Miller * Gainesville, FL Joe Bohn * Orlando, FL - Aaron Mulder * NJ - Aaron Mulder - - JAOO - Jacek Laskowski, Bill Dudney and Matt Hogstrom presented on Geronimo. - - ApacheCon US - Two presentations * Jeff Genender * Aaron Mulder and Bruce Snyder co-presented - - ApacheCon Asia - One presentation * Vamsavardhana Reddy did a Geronimo tutorial in Columbo - - Open Source Conference (OSC) in Tokyo presented by Kevan Miller - - Spring Conference Dain Sundstrom spoke about Xbean Certifications Passed J2EE 1.4 Certification on Azul Network Appliance Releases 1.1.1 was released in September 1.2 is currently being released and is being managed by Dain Sundstrom and Alan Cabrera Some discussion has started on the Dev list about Java EE 5.0 work. Other Work GCache and WADI clustering efforts are moving along. Micro G (Geronimo-framework) is in trunk New JMX console was added to Geronimo 1.2 Added DOJO support as a native part of Geronimo Community New committers - - Prasad Kashyap - - Christopher M. Cardona - - Vamsavardhana Reddy - - Anita Kulshreshtha PMC additions - - Jason Dillon - - Hiram Chirino - - James Strachan - - Bruce Snyder - - Kevan Miller - - Paul McMahan - - David Blevins - - Hernan Cunico - - Rick McGuire - - Joe Bohn - - Alan Cabrera - - Guillaume Nodet ----------------------------------------- Attachment U: Status report for the Apache Shale Project Overview ------------- The Apache Shale TLP was created in June 2006 to further the development of the Shale Framework, a web application framework built on top of JavaServer Faces. This is our latest quarterly report. PMC and Committer Changes -------------------------------------------- We have added two new committers this quarter: * David Geary, who has worked on Shale code when it was part of the Struts project * Rahul Alkolkar, who has made substantial contributions (particularly in the Dialog Manager area, where one implementation is based on his work in the Commons SCXML project) Current Development Activities -------------------------------------------- This quarter, we have focused on several major areas of work, in preparation for what is hoped to be a release that can be voted GA quality: * Per many requests from the user community, split the functionality supported by Shale into finer grained individual modules, so users can pick and choose which combinations of functionality they prefer. * Improve the quality and organization of the web site documentation and user guide information, including migrating it to the corresponding submodules (we use Maven2's website generation technology). * Replace the original dialog manager implementation with a two tier API that addresses the major functional limitations of the original design (such as only supporting a single window or frame), plus added pluggable back end support for the state manager engine. Two implementations are provided by default -- a "basic" one that is functionally compatible with the previous support, and an advanced one that uses Commons SCXML to manage execution. * The inevitable bugfix and minor enhancements endeavors. Because it is likely that some of the Shale dependencies (such as Standalone Tiles from Struts) will not be completed yet -- they are gonig through a major refactoring cycle at the moment -- we are considering posting an upcoming release where different modules might have different quality grades, so that the parts of Shale that are GA quality can stop suffering from users waiting for a "final" release before they get started in earnest. Community ----------------- At ApacheCon US, we announced the winner of a logo contest, to have a nice website logo (and a "powered by" image) that would be made available for use by developers using Shale. The winning artist has attempted to submit his ICLA via fax, but it has not yet been recorded (he's in Egypt, which might be part of the issue there). The Shale developer community continues to operate harmoniously, both within the project and with other projects (such as Struts and MyFaces) where there is substantial overlap in committer base, and many of the committers are active on multiple projects simultaneously. There are no community issues to raise to the Board's attention. ----------------------------------------- Attachment V: Status report for the Apache Harmony project Currently, we have no issues requiring board attention. We are ready to switch our infrastructure to that of a TLP - website URL is ready, group created, and we expect to bring that live this week. Of interest was Sun's recent announcement of their implementation of Java SE licensed under GPLv2. As advocates of open source Java SE, we think this is a positive thing and validate our work for the last 18 months - more open source Java is great. While their choice of license precludes immediate collaboration between the projects, we've already floated one idea of how we can work together - asking Sun to relicense the javac compiler under CDDL so Harmony can redistribute - and we will keep exploring other ideas. We have added one new committer, Nadya Morozova, who has been doing lots of good work in the area of our documentation and website. Currently this hasn't been announced on the dev list as we're waiting for ICLA. We continue to make progress - we have achieved 95% completeness on the class library for Java SE 5 and the DRLVM continues to improve in performance, stability and completeness. ----------------------------------------- Attachment W: Apache Labs Proposed Bylaws Apache Labs Bylaws ------------------ Executive Summary ----------------- The Apache Software Foundation is well known for its motto "community is more important than code" and has designed its incubation facilities accordingly. While healthy and diverse open development communities provide a very efficient solution for self-sustaining, long-lasting and well-adapting software development practices, the creation and bootstrap of such community is normally a long and emotionally expensive process. Moreover, in order to provide a seed to grow and ground discussions on technical levels, the ASF incubation rules require the "podlings" to join the incubation process with an established and working codebase. While this is a tremendous benefit for the incubator (because setting the bar high avoids it to have to do the filtering and dissipating the negative energy that would develop in such a process), it also implies that the ability for the ASF to "innovate" is left at the top level projects that graduated out of incubation. Several of these projects provide places for their committers to work on innovative ideas (these are normally called "sandboxes" or "whiteboards"). Unfortunately, such efforts are constrained by the project bylaws, which can limit the degree of innovation that such efforts can exhibit. Apache Labs are the place where ASF committers can work on innovative, blue-sky and off-the-wall ideas, without having to worry about fitting in an existing project bylaw or building a community around it, but unlike other external venues that can offer similar hosting services, as a place where fellow committers can offer suggestions and help. Guidelines ---------- - The Apache Labs project infrastructure is composed of the following parts: o) a zone o) a virtual host (http://labs.apache.org/) o) a SVN repository (http://svn.apache.org/asf/repos/labs/) o) three mailing lists - labs@labs.apache.org - commits@labs.apache.org (this receives the svn commits diffs) - private@labs.apache.org o) a lab registry (a collection of machine-readable descriptors) - Every ASF committer has both read and write access to the entire Labs SVN repository. - Everybody can subscribe and post messages to "labs@labs.apache.org". Posters are suggested to use '[labname]' prefix in their email subjects to give proper context to the email threads. - Everybody can subscribe to "commits@labs.apache.org", but only automated agents can post to it (svn commit diffs, cron jobs, etc..). - The Labs PMC members (and all ASF members) can subscribe and post to private@labs.apache.org, everybody else can post but their messages will be moderated. - Every ASF committer can ask for one or more labs. The creation of the lab requires a PMC lazy consensus vote (at least three +1 and no -1, 72 hours). - If approved, the ASF committer will create the lab on his/her own and register the lab's descriptor in the lab registry. The committer that asks for the lab becomes known as that lab's PI (principal investigator). The PI is the sole responsible for keeping their lab descriptor up-to-date. Failure to do so can result in lab completion. - Labs are prohibited from making releases. - The Labs PMC will not ask for commit access for people that are not already ASF committers. - The Labs PMC will not ask for lab-specific mail lists. - Each Labs PMC member can resign at any time. The PMC can elect another ASF committer as Labs PMC member at any time. Only ASF committers can become members of the Labs PMC. The elected ASF committer reserves the right to reject the nomination without justification. - A Lab PI can resign and select another committer as PI just by communicating so to the PMC. It becomes effective if the new PI accepts. - The Apache Labs will welcome existing lab-like efforts (sandboxes, whiteboards) from existing ASF TLPs to become labs. - Changes to the Apache Labs bylaws require a 2/3 vote from the PMC members. Lab Lifecycle ------------- - A lab can have four states: o Active [activity is happening] o Idle [activity is paused but it will be resumed in the future] o Promoted [lab started incubation] o Completed [activity has been completed and unlikely to resume in the future] - The lab PI can change the state of the lab from 'active' to 'idle' and back at any time, just by updating the descriptor. - The Labs PMC can change the state of a lab with a majority vote. - In any vote when a lab state is changed, and in such votes only, the lab's PI's vote will be counted along with the PMC members' to form majority. - When a lab is "idled", the descriptor is changed accordingly and a boilerplate disclaimer is placed in the README file. - When a lab is re-"activated", the descriptor is changed accordingly and a the boilerplate disclaimer is removed from the README file. - When a lab is "promoted", the files are moved over to the incubation area. - When a lab is "completed", the lab is archived and removed from SVN. Guidelines Rationale -------------------- The voting guidelines are not established to induce rigid process, but rather to avoid that a single negative vote can act as a veto. We expect that most votes will resolve themselves with lazy consensus (three +1 and no -1). In case a -1 appears, it is good practice to try to reach a compromise that results in the removal of such -1. In case such a compromise cannot be reached, the majority vote takes place. Established social practices throughout the foundation suggest that such cases are very rare. The reason why the lab PI is included in the 'state change' vote is to act as arbiter in case the PMC is undecided. It also gives the feeling of participating in the decision-making process. The reason why the Labs PMC has the power to vote a 'state change' even if the lab PI is in disagreement is to allow the PMC to promote those labs that become too active even if the labs PI and participants would rather stay in the labs. The reason why the Labs PMC has to perform a lazy vote on the establishment of a lab is to provide oversight with a minimal overhead. Such oversight is meant to avoid the abuse of labs as 'personal backups' or 'dumping grounds', which would be off-topic in the Labs' mission, or use labs as a way to 'fork' existing efforts and route around incubation practices. It also allows the PMC to allow labs only if they have a functional machine-readable descriptor, which allows the automation of the information gathering about the labs. The reason why the Labs PMC cannot create new mailing lists or institute new committers is to avoid labs to become a way for people to 'route around' the incubator (and also to avoid add more work to 'infrastructure') The reason why Labs are prohibited from making releases is to simplify operation and avoid the legal oversight associated with the release process and to avoid labs from becoming ways to 'route around' the incubator. The reason why Labs have a fixed number of mailing list is to force people to watch over other's people's shoulders, to avoid mail-list creation load on infrastructure and to provide a comfort threshold that successful labs can easily trigger as an indicator that they might be ready for promotion into the incubator. The reason why all committers have write-access to all labs is to avoid adding infrastructure costs and to simplify collaboration. The use of version control, the selected nature of committership and the existence of a single communication channel guarantee minimal risks and collision costs in doing so. The reason why labs must have a machine-readable descriptor is to allow automation of lab metadata gathering and web site publishing in order to scale to hundreds of labs and provide more effective oversight. ------------------------------------------------------ End of agenda for the November 15, 2006 board meeting.