The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Minutes August 18, 2004 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PDT -0700 and was begun at 10:12 when a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the chairman. The meeting was held via teleconference, hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent: IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Ken Coar Jim Jagielski Geir Magnusson Jr. (arrived at 11:11) Sam Ruby Greg Stein Sander Striker Directors Absent: Brian Behlendorf Dirk-Willem van Gulik Stefano Mazzocchi Guests: Noel J. Bergman Jennifer Machovec 3. Minutes from previous meetings A. The meeting of November 16, 2003 CVS - board/board_minutes_2003_11_16.txt Approved by General Consent. B. The meeting of June 23, 2004 CVS - board/board_minutes_2004_06_23.txt Tabled for next meeting. The actual timetable of the meeting did not follow the below listing. In particular, item 6B (regarding Corporate CLAs) was actually discussed close to the start of the meeting to accomodate Noel's and Jennifer's schedule. This discussion ran a significantly long time, resulting in the numerous "tabling" of agenda items. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] The ASF has been busy over the past month with a number of legal issues. We're getting bigger and broader and running into more of these issues. Thankfully, many of them are cumulative and contribute towards a long-term solution rather than many interruptive point-by-point issues. We have also spent a good amount of time looking at where we want the ASf to go, what kinds of interactions we want to have with corporations, and what kind of information flow (or limitations) we want to have. The discussion has been very good, and is ongoing. An interesting point is that a good number of Members have been getting involved in the discussion about the broader goals of the ASF. The ASF seems to be on a good track although it appears that we're bulging a bit at the seams. If we get some better tools, then we'll probably be able to scale a bit better, but it is certainly interesting to deal with "too big" issues. B. President [Dirk] No Report. C. Infrastructure [Sander] The Infrastructure team is battling the same problems as reported before. Infrastructure needs help to get things done. The root rotation doens't get filled. An obvious way out is hiring a (parttime) sysadmin; so that the team can focus on getting automation tools developed making the job less involved. That said, Ken Coar offered help in writing mailing list management tools. Also Geir offered to help out with the mailing lists. And we are happy to announce that Berin Lautenbach has joined the group of roots. Hardware wise we gained a switch contributed by Theo van Dinter. We are waiting for that to arrive. Ajax still doesn't have console access, nor do we have the accounts on the power switches to power cycle the box. SurfNet also asked us to work out the reverse DNS on our end, which we haven't gotten around to yet. DNS is under the Infrastructure's team control again, and we are happy to announce that we added to more secondaries, making our DNS servers a bit more globally spread. A lot of work has been done getting VMware instances up and running and this seems to pay off. Investigation in applicability is ongoing. Services hosted on nagoya will be moved off to other boxes, given the current (in)stability of some of the services on nagoya. eris, one of the new IBM x345s seems to be having some problems. Investigation is ongoing. D. Treasurer [Chuck] No Report. E. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] The ASF office has been receiving and recording the steady stream of incoming CLAs. At present, the ASF office is sharing the same phone number as Jim's home office. The number of calls to that line for ASF- related business is starting to increase (the vast majority of the calls are completely worthless, of course). To avoid confusion Jim is looking into obtaining another phone number exclusively for the ASF. 5. Special Orders A. Termination of the Apache Commons Project WHEREAS, the Apache Commons PMC deems it no longer in the best interests of the Foundation to continue the Apache Commons Project at this time due to a currently insufficient amount of community participation. WHEREAS, the Apache Commons PMC no longer contains any active code bases under its direct purview. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the Apache Commons Project is hereby terminated; and be it further RESOLVED, that that the Apache Commons PMC be and hereby no longer responsible for the creation and maintenance of software related to reusable libraries and components, based on software licensed to the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Commons" is hereby terminated; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache Commons PMC is hereby terminated. Special Order 5 A, termination of Apache Commons Project was approved via unaninmous vote. B. Establish the Apache Metro 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 an open-source software platform supporting secure component publication, discovery, composition, deployment, and management, for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Apache Metro PMC", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the "Apache Metro PMC" be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of a software platform supporting component publication, discovery, composition, deployment, and management, based on software licensed to the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Metro" 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 Apache Metro PMC, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache Metro 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 Metro PMC: Timothy Bennett tbennett@apache.org J Aaron Farr farr@apache.org Cameron Fieber cfieber@apache.org Niclas Hedhman niclas@apache.org Alex Karasulu akarasulu@apache.org Stephen McConnell mcconnell@apache.org Andreas Oberhack oberhack@apache.org NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Niclas Hedhman be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Metro, 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 Apache Metro PMC be and hereby is tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to encourage open development and increased participation in the Apache Metro community. Special Order 5 B, Establishment of Apache Metro Project, was tabled. C. Appoint Brian Fitzpatrick as a Vice President Special Order 5 C, Appointment of Brian Fitzpatrick as a Vice President, was tabled. There was discussion on what value or additional power this granted to Brian over what he currently has. 6. Discussion Items A. Visibility of CLAs Desired action: a decision on "how far" visibility reaches. Members, officers, committers, and/or the public. Discussion Item 6 A, Visibility of CLAs, was tabled. B. Corporate CLAs It appears that there may be incomplete understanding of what the current CCLA requires of the ASF. It imposes burdens on the Foundation that did not apply before. Jennifer Machovec, legal council for IBM, was invited to participate in a discussion over the current versions of the Corporate CLA and recommended changes to it, mostly as related to the Derby code donation, as well as to basic enhancement and protection. The revised Corporate CLA was to list all employees authorized to contribute code as well as the individual projects to which they can contribute to. Jennifer noted that the suggested changes provided an "irrevocable donation of code" in any and all circumstances, even if the employee had made a mistake. It was remarked that this would place the ASF under additional administrative burdens, monitoring and matching CVS commits against the list. It also tends to move the ASF further and further away from the core concept of a "relationship" which the ASF has been built on, that of the ASF with regards to the individual. It was remarked that the ASF's "web of trust" extends between the ASF and the individual contributor, and, at least in the opinion of some directors, that is as far as it needs to be. It was further discussed that the proposed changes would, in the minds of several directors, make the development environment with the ASF less healthy and organic, but placing restrictions on which projects people could work on. The CLAs were supposed to open the doors for people to contribute, rather than close or restrict them. Jennifer stated that, in her opinion, this was leaving the ASF in a risky position and could leave it open to "problems" in the future. The board's position was that taking authority and ownership over controls that should really be placed by the individual him/herself or between an employee and employer was likely more dangerous and risky. In essence, the ASF works with people who have exhibited a high level of trust, and that we can therefore trust them to do the right thing. And if they don't, it isn't something that the ASF has monitored or controlled, so the impact to us directly is much smaller; taking on those responsibilities opens us up to more risk. It was correctly noted that the present Corporate CLA and v2 of the Apache License are incompatible. Jennifer stated that she would take our comments under review and try to work up another revision. C. Derby code drop The Derby code is ready to be uploaded to the Apache repository, but the legal documents need to be sorted out first. In addition, it appears that an export-control form will need to be submitted before the code can be published from our site. Discussion Item 6 C, Derby code drop, was tabled, mostly due to the issues and topics discussed in 6 B. 7. Committee Reports A. Apache Ant Project [Conor MacNeill] See Attachment A Approved by General Consent. B. Apache Cocoon Project [Sylvain Wallez] See Attachment B Approved by General Consent. C. Apache Forrest Project [David Crossley] See Attachment C Approved by General Consent. D. Apache HTTP Server Project [Sander Striker] See Attachment D Approved by General Consent. E. Apache Logging Project [Ceki Gülcü] See Attachment E Approved by General Consent. F. Apache Perl Project [Doug MacEachern] See Attachment F Approved by General Consent. G. Apache XML Project [Berin Lautenbach] See Attachment G Approved by General Consent. H. Public Relations Committee [Brian Fitzpatrick] See Attachment H Approved by General Consent. I. Apache DB Project [John McNally] See Attachment I Approved by General Consent. J. Apache Geronimo Project [Geir Magnusson Jr] See Attachment J Approved by General Consent. K. Apache Incubator Project [Noel Bergman] See Attachment K Approved by General Consent. L. Apache James Project [Serge Knystautas] See Attachment L Approved by General Consent. M. Apache Maven Project [Jason van Zyl] See Attachment M Approved by General Consent. N. Apache Struts Project [Craig McClanahan] See Attachment N Approved by General Consent. O. Apache TCL Project [David Welton] See Attachment O Approved by General Consent. P. Conference Planning Committee [Ken Coar] See Attachment P Approved by General Consent. Q. Security Team [Ben Laurie] See Attachment Q No report submitted. R. Apache Jakarta Project [Henri Yandell] See Attachment R Tabled until next meeting. S. Apache Avalon Project [J Aaron Farr] See Attachment S Tabled until next meeting. T. Apache SpamAssassin Project [Daniel Quinlan] See Attachment T Approved by General Consent. 8. Unfinished Business 9. New Business It was asked whether the ASF had a corporate seal. Jim reported that he had obtained one when the ASF was initially incorporated in 1999 and has it. There was some discussion regarding the continued way that JBoss is referring to Tomcat. For example, they are not referring to it as Apache Tomcat. Also, in their descriptions they are creating the mistaken impression that they "control" or "direct" Apache Tomcat development. Geir volunteered to contact them regarding our concerns. 10. Announcements A. Hormel was sent a letter that basically said "thanks for your letter." We'll stay in a holding pattern unless/until they do something else, or until the SpamArrest trademark case is resolved (which will define the resolution of our pending trademarks). 11. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 1200 PDT -0700. Adjourned at 12:06. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache Ant Project o Ant 1.6.2 Ant 1.6.2 was released on July 16th, 2004 Although a minor dot release, this release contained a number of bug fixes, including improved XML namespace support, consistent reporting of error locations with build files, reorganization of the xalan related tasks to remove xalan-1 support, elimination of memory leaks, etc. A further Ant 1.6.3 release may be necessary to pick up some changes and fixes which did not make it into the 1.6.2 release. o Ant 1.7 (CVS Head) CVS head development continues, of course. There is currently no planned release date for Ant 1.7. o Nightly builds Nightly builds have been inactive for a long time (since Sept 2003) and the website has recently been changed to reflect this. Traditionally the nightly builds for Ant were taken from the output from Gump. Changes in Gump's setup resulted in these becoming unavailable. Whilst Gump runs will soon resume, the Ant community will need to decide how it wants to provide nightly builds, considering the potential issues in Gump produced outputs (i.e. reliance on non-ASF hosted code). The options would be: 1. point directly to the Gump produced builds and note the warnings that the Gump team will have in place regarding the reliability of the inputs. 2. copy Gump outputs relating to Ant into Ant's nightly build area and add suitable warnings in this area 3. Perform nightly builds (at perhaps some other frequency) in a "trusted" environment, whatever that may be - probably a committer machine. 4. Don't provide nightly builds at all. o Legal Issues No JSRs, No TCKs, No issues. o Branches Ant has traditionally had two branches of development, the current release branch and the trunk which represents the next release. Whilst we have managed this in the past, there have been a few instances where changes were not applied to both active branches. One option would be to not apply all changes to both branches piecemeal but to pick up all branch changes in regular merge operations and live with the differences between branches between those merge points. OTOH, being an open source project both branches are in active use by multiple developers/users and there is always pressure to have fixes available immediately on both branches. o Inactive committers At the end February I sent an email to 15 inactive committers asking if they wished to remain part of the Ant project. I received two replies. I intend, with the PMC's confirmation to make all such committers emeritus and to remove them from Ant's avail entry. o Community All well on the community front. Matt Benson was added to the PMC. The number of open bugs remains a perennial problem. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Cocoon Project Community: - Cocoon version 2.1.5 released in May: it's a bugfix release with minor new features. It was re-released as 2.1.5.1 in July when we noticed that our build system was not including the license and notice files [1]. - Lenya version 1.2 released in June - no new committer on Cocoon, one new committer on Lenya - Lenya proposed as a top-level project - PMC composition change: new chair, some new members and some resignations. Infrastructure: - moved to subversion - cocoondev.org wiki moved to ASF wiki Ongoing research work : - Javaflow (implementation of continuations in Java), which triggered the creation of a group to propose a JSR [2] - the "Kernel", a container for Cocoon blocks, - "Butterfly", an experimentation to use Spring as a component container instead of Avalon Misc: - Important new live sites with VNU UK [3] moving all its sites to Cocoon (high-traffic sites which where sucessfully slashdotted) [1] http://www.apache.org/dist/cocoon/cocoon-2.1.5-removed.txt [2] http://docs.codehaus.org/display/continuation/Home [3] http://www.vnunet.com ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Forrest Project Issues needing board attention ______________________________ None New committers and new PMC members __________________________________ None General status ______________ * Successfully moved to top-level forrest.apache.org * The community is steadily expanding and contributing. * A bit hampered by not enough people to get a release out, and supporting a growing user base on the old 0.5 version. Issues still to be dealt with by the Forrest PMC ________________________________________________ * Not yet completed our project guidelines. Some of us have turned our attention to the top-level ASF docs, especially the "how-it-works" document. We will continue to enhance those docs, then our project guidelines can just refer. * This delay with defining roles means that we cannot yet bring in any new committers or PMC members. We have had good PMC discussion about the procedure and are now close. Progress ________ * Created as top-level project, with all that entails. * Thanks to infrastructure@ for their help with the move. * Moved from old xml.apache.org/forrest and added .htaccess * Retained links and association at Apache XML project. * Started process to move Jira Issues from cocoondev.org (thanks to Outerthought for getting us started). * Since creation of user@f.a.o list we have many new users. * New distribution mirrors for Forrest (still old 0.5.1). * Ever closer to 0.6 release, we use it for our website. General observations during last quarter ________________________________________ * Need improved and consistent top-level ASF docs. * Need guidelines for PMCs to assess licenses and to know what to do when unlicensed code is committed by accident. * The process with infrastructure@ to set up a new project is difficult for everyone. It was a lot of work for us to get ready and to define our needs, and then a lot of work in dribs and drabs to get actually established. Don't know what to suggest, other than we need to encourage more people to help at infra@ and need to steadily improve the /dev/ web-space to provide guidelines and templates for requests. ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache HTTP Server Project ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Logging Project Projects listed in alphabethical order. - report for the PMC The Logging Services PMC has focused its efforts on verifying the legal and proper status of all projects and committers under the PMC's jurisdiction. We have been working with the Foundation to ensure all committers and code are properly covered as far as licensing and intellectual property rights are concerned. While the incubation process is ongoing, we have made some progress towards agreeing on common interfaces and schemas for logging services in the different programming languages. - report for log4cxx Two new committers, namely, Curt Arnold and Christophe de Vienne, have joined the log4cxx project. log4cxx version 1.0 should be released within the next quarter. This version should have the same feature as log4j 1.2.8 but will not include log4j 1.3 additions. For the moment, the supported OS/platforms are Linux/Mandrake10, Windows/MSVC6, Windows/MSVC7.1, Windows/Cygwin, and FreeBSD. We need testers in order to support Mac OS X, HPUX, and SunOS. - report for log4j The Log4j team continued progress towards the next major release, log4j version 1.3. We anticipate the first alpha build of this version within the next quarter. We have made specific progress in the area of splitting the log4j distribution into smaller components: a core, GUI viewers like Chainsaw, and other additions from the sandbox like filters and configuration tools. - report for log4net No report has been submitted. - report for log4php Marco Vassura has contacted the various contributors in order to obtain their formal approval. Contributor Licence change approval received by the Logging Services PMC on: Abel Gonzales 1 Jul 2004 01:25:47 +0200 Ilker Kiris ? Domenico Lordi ? Sergio Strampelli 30 Jun 2004 13:54:16 +0200 Blake Watters ? Simon Wiest 30 Jun 2004 14:55:37 +0200 ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Perl Project -- Releases -- 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. --- The mod_perl 1.99 series is a development track designed to become mod_perl 2.0; it works with httpd 2.0.x. Recent releases: 1.99_14 - May 21, 2004 --- 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. Recent releases: 1.12 - June 28, 2004 1.11 - May 21, 2004 -- Development -- Development on mod_perl 2.0 and Apache::Test is moving at a healthy pace. Now working on polishing the API so we can get ready for the 2.0 release hopefully somewhere in summer. -- Users -- As always the mod_perl users list is thriving. Though usage is declining a bit recently, with 1.5M or 4.8M sites depending on which survey you look at. the advocacy list was revived and a few folks are putting together a mod_perl advocacy efforts plan. ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache XML Project General Comments ---------------- The Federation of many of the sub-projects is slowly happening, although not as quickly as everyone might like. With the Graphics TLP proposal pending, we will now concentrate on moving Xerces and Xalan to TLP over the next quarter. PMC arrivals, departures ------------------------ With Forrest becoming a TLP, Jeff Turner requests that he be removed from the XML PMC. The request for the XML Graphics TLP (Batik and FOP) is pending. Issues needing attention: ------------------------- The JuiCE sub-project in the incubator is still waiting on action on the corpriate CLA from uni of memphis. Axkit ----- Vacation and conference season is upon us so not a lot has changed. Code in the 1.6.x branch remains more-or-less stable with a few bug fixes along the way. We added Michael Nachbaur as a core committer. Migration to TLP is stalled pending the confirmation of the new proposed PMC Chair and markup of the subsequent charter proposal. Perhaps the biggest non-technical news item in the last period was the release of XML Publishing with AxKit from O'Reilly (yay!). We also saw a noticable increase in interest in AxKit at this year's OSCon. Batik ----- Cameron McCormack? was added as a committer. Proposal for XML-Graphics joint TLP with FOP discussed. Working to update the source headers. No major code changes, some bug fixing, some enhancements to the handling of external documents. Commons ------- No major activity on xml-commons this quarter. Some small new code donations have been discussed briefly, but without a lot of followup. We need a few more committers to follow up and evaluate the ideas - especially to see if these kinds of things can just be added to xml-commons or if they'd actually need to go through the incubator. Some Xerces and Xalan committers have been bugfixing in some of the common components, so I hope we'll prepare a release for general use in the next month or so. Note we should ensure the community followsup on the status report from Xerces-J to ensure the JAXP changes they noted get committed properly. -- ShaneCurcuru FOP --- No big events, except for the discussions on the XML Graphics project and... Peter B. West moved off to SourceForge? with his special FOP branch, just like Victor Mote did earlier. This was a result of the inability of the community to decide on a common design approach for the new layout engine. On the other side, both Victor and Peter remain in contact with the FOP project. They have both signalled that they are pleased about the XML Graphics project and that they will support the creation of shared basic components. This will faciliate comparing the three different layout engines being developed right now and will ensure that as little code as possible will need to be duplicated. It is clear that this is not an ideal circumstance but there's no alternative visible right now. Xalan-C++ --------- A vote passed to move to Jira as the issue tracking system. This will happen in the near future. Other than that, just the usual bug fixes since the last status report. --BrianMinchau Xalan-J/XSLTC ------------- A vote passed to move to Jira as the issue tracking system. This will happen in the near future. Other than that, just the usual bug fixes since the last status report. --BrianMinchau Xerces-C++ ---------- Xerces-J Work has been continuing on Xerces 2.7.0. The current status is available here [*]. We understand that Sun intends to contribute the portions of the RI for JAXP 1.3 that were not developed in Apache back to Xerces-J and Xalan-J shortly; we hope to release Xerces 2.7.0 soon thereafter. We have one new committer to report: Neil Delima was voted in during the last weeks of May. The plan to migrate Xerces-* to a top-level project seems to be on a bit of a summer hiatus. Once everything moves back into high gear in the Fall, hopefully interest from the community will increase and this will pick up speed. [*] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/xml-xerces/java/Xerces2.7.0-REL_PLAN.html Xerces-P -------- Nothing to report for this period. Xindice ------- Nothing to report for this period. Xindice will stay within XML PMC for now. XML-Security ------------ Two new committers have been voted in - Davanum Srinivas and Raul Benito. Raul has been doing a lot of work on optimising the library. In the C++ library we have been developing a server to allow interop testing of XML Key Management Specification (XKMS) using the Apache xml-security library. We are almost at the point where we can put an Alpha server online with full support for the XKISS (XML Key Information Service Specification). Once that is online, we will start looking at an XKRSS (XML Key Registration Service Specification) message set implementation. ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Public Relations Committee The PRC has been very active since its inception in June, with most of the efforts going towards determining what the exact mission of the PRC will be. Beyond that, our goal is to document a set of processes for dealing with press and fundraising inquiries. There have been a number of discussions concerning possible avenues and goals for fundraising and PR, including: Hiring an Executive Director, forming an ASF Sponsorship program, and other fundraising and budget opportunities. The acceptance of Derby into the Incubator provided the PRC with a prime opportunity to learn the pros and cons of working with an external entity under non-disclosure. The PRC is currently discussing how to better handle these cases in the future. Lastly, in the last two weeks, numerous members have joined the PRC mailing list in the hopes of observing and (hopefully) assisting. ----------------------------------------- Attachment I: Status report for the Apache DB Project Torque has not had much new development though bug fixes have been committed. The user list remains active. OJB has the big news this quarter, achieving 1.0 release. New members of the PMC include: Matthew Baird, Thomas Dudziak, and Brian McCallister. And two new committers: Martin Kalen and Robert Sfeir. DB is currently sponsoring the Axion project within incubator which has stagnated, but showed signs of progress again last week with a request for creation of cvs module and mailing lists. That's it. No controversy to report. ----------------------------------------- Attachment J: Status report for the Apache Geronimo Project The Geronimo project is moving along. After the push for TLP status, there was slight 'relaxation' in organizational activity due to a few factors, the main one being due to professional changes and commitments outside of the project for a few major committers (people got jobs, people got new jobs, etc). I think that this is just part of the normal ebb and flow of volunteer life. Despite that, much progress has been made technically as well as in terms of community outreach and engagement. We also are discussing our policy for comitters, both the requirements for new ones, and possibly a proactive stance towards inactive ones. In terms of the goal of certification of compatibility, work is in progress and we feel that it's slipping a little from our goal of 'in the third quarter' to probably 'at the end of the third quarter'. Technical Progress ------------------ Here's a partial list of the technical progress made by the project : - JTA: transaction recovery partly works using ObjectWeb HOWL logger. Pluggable framework for recovery in place. - J2EECA: inbound adapters can be deployed against mdbs in OpenEJB and deliver messages: JMS inbound and outbound works with ActiveMQ. - EJB timer: Support in geronimo for generic transactional timer services. Used in OpenEJB ejb timer support (currently stateless session and mdb only). - JSR 88 Deployment - working - Message Driven Beans - done - Support for old deployment descriptors - done - EAR deployment - done External Community Engagement ----------------------------- - Spring : formed a close working relationship with the Spring application framework community. Spring can now be hosted and managed by the Geronimo Container (not J2EE stack), providing to Spring users with the management and deployment features of Geronimo the Container. - ActiveMQ, targeted as the JMS implementation, is working well with Geronimo. This is listed as community engagement as our original connection was James Strachan, Geronimo member and ActiveMQ founder and our current interactions involve more people on both sides - Apache Webservices : our planned collaboration with AWS is now working. AWS community members are bringing AWS to Geronimo and working on the integration pieces. An AWS member is being considered for Geronimo committer status. - ObjectWeb HOWL : we are using the HOWL project for transaction logging and recovery. HOWL is a logging project at ObjectWeb with significant participation by Geronimo members. - OSCON : Geronimo will be well represented at OSCON via 3 talks (IIRC) and a "collaborative community" BOF presented by ObjectWeb and the ASF. - EJB3 EG : the ASF is represented on the EJB3 expert group by Jeremy Boynes, and there is a 'lurker' group at Geronimo providing advice and support. Further, David Blevins, a Geronimo member, is an independent expert on the EG. Community Development --------------------- One of our first orders of business has been to continue to increase our committers. To that end, we are currently discussing the offering of commit status to an individual from AWS. There's no bad outcome possible - it's all about timing and being sure of alignment with project. Future ------ Besides the continuing technical, community and committer work, our next order of business is finalizing project guidelines. So far, there has been no issues to be resolved via appeal to law - it's a good community that has had no trouble resolving differences - but we know that there will be a time. ----------------------------------------- Attachment K: Status report for the Apache Incubator Project Nicola Ken Barozzi stepped down as Incubator PMC Chair, and was replaced by Noel J. Bergman. We thank Nicola Ken for his efforts in helping to recast the Incubator to best fulfill its designated functions. Since the last report to the Board, several projects have graduate from the Incubator, including: Geronimo, XML-Beans, SpamAssassin, and Pluto. Lenya appears ready to fly the nest, and may have a proposal for the Board, although one is not ready at the time of this writing. Significant entries into the Incubator include Beehive and MyFaces (a JavaServer Faces implementation). The long awaited Axion database project appears ready to begin incubation. A project sponsored by the HTTP Server PMC for integrating Apache Web Server with ISO/ECMA CLI has also begun incubation. A few projects seem stalled in the Incubator, and are not responding to requests for status. We may have to cull the herd in a few cases, but these appear to have failed to attract/build a community, and seem relatively inactive. Infrastructure bottlenecks are effecting the Incubator. I say this without pointing fingers, since as a member of the Infrastructure Team, I am one of the people responsible for being or removing those bottlenecks. It is simply that we can create a rash of requests for project resources, and we (the Infrastructure Team) are short-staffed. One thing that should help will be improved scripts for mailing list creation. The Incubator has worked with the newly formed PRC to help establish some guidelines, so that the PRC can help ensure that any PR related to Incubator projects makes clear the project's status. We have also had discussions related to trying to make sure that projects really are begun Incubation before they are used for PR purposes. Licensing and other IP related issues remain a topic of discussion. It would help to have some legal resource(s) participating with the Incubator. All in all, the Incubator seems to be finding its stride and proving a good asset for the Foundation. - 0 - Here are the STATUS reports from the PPMCs that have sent one in. Status report for WSRP4J ==================================== * is the STATUS file up to date? (also post link) The cwiki file on the incubator site is up to date as well as the STATUS file in the project directory. http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wsrp4j.html * any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be addressed? No. * what has been done for incubation since the last report? 1. Annointed a new committer: sgoldstein 2. Various bug fixes. 3. Restructured the website and added the Portals logo. 4. Migrated to the new moinmoin wiki. * plans and expectations for the next period? 1. Continue development work on outstanding WSRP 1.0 items (see TODO wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/portals/WSRP4JTodoList) 2. Continue to build the community by encouraging developers to contribute code. We are building a user population, but few outside developers have made code contributions. 3. Will probably ask for a vote to graduate from the Incubator into Portals. * any recommendations for how incubation could run more smoothly for you? None. * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!) Status report from the Directory PPMC ====================================== Since the last report: * Alan Cabrera has joined us to write the stub compiler for Snickers. * We have resusitated the original LDAPd code base right before we entered the incubator to have a running server. This is there for people to be able to play around with as server: fire it up and kick the tires. Of course all the package names and other aspects of the server have been adjusted to convey that it is now a part of Apache. * We have begun to focus specifically on Snickers after a recommendation by Nicola and Noel. The goal is to lift this sole IP issue from the project to prepare us to exit the incubator. At the present time the decoder half of the BER codec is complete and working well. We should have the encoder half complete soon since it is already under way. * The server front end is ready and comes up in the new Eve server. The only problem at this point is that it returns busy for every response. This will remain the case until we pull the new backend subsystem out of the sandbox to complete the new server. * Thanks to Vincent we have a new website look and feel using Maven out of the box. We also have been discussing a better ontological organization to the site to reflect the role of our subprojects within the overall effort. Status report for Depot ======================================== 1). Is the STATUS file up to date? No 2). Any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be addressed? No, all files licensed, all commiters have singed CLA 3). What has been done for incubation since the last report? * Site update. * Packages renamed to "depot" 4). Plans and expectations for the next period? * Delete unused under developed code. * Complete Download manger for use by gump and others. * Support "directory artifacts" for use by antworks and others. 5). Any recommendations for how incubation could run more smoothly for you? no Status report for Beehive ======================================== * Beehive's initial source code contribution was made on Friday, 19 July. * All mailing lists and the SVN directory are completely up and running. * We still need to get CLAs from three of the committers, but the rest are working fine. * Requests for JIRA and a wiki page are pending. * So, basic infrastructure stuff is in good shape...now it's time to start helping people understand the code base and how they can best contribute to it. Status report for JuiCE ======================================== Status report for JuiCE for the Incubator JuiCE has stalled waiting on a set of changes to the CLA proposed by Uni of Memphis being approved by the ASF. Without this approval, Walter Hoehn cannot get commit access to the repository. As he is one of the key developers we need this sorted out before we can really ramp up. * is the STATUS file up to date? (also post link) Yes - http://incubator.apache.org/projects/juice.html * any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be addressed? No. * what has been done for incubation since the last report? One account (for Noah Levitt) has been created, and the source code has been imported into SVN. * plans and expectations for the next period? Hopefully sort out the CLA for Memphis Uni and get development going again. Status report for HTTPD-CLI ======================================== In March '04, the httpd PMC referred the mod_aspdotnet contribution (Code Grant ack'ed in rev 1.7 of foundation/grants.txt) for incubation. The project was recently picked back up, with Will Rowe now having the cycles to devote to the care and feeding required of incubation. Ian Holsman, also an httpd PMC member, stepped up to co-shepherd the incubation. Invites to the interested parties were sent last week to join the mailing list cli-dev@httpd.apache.org, followed by an invitation to the dev@httpd community. The status page/ip incubation template was created, with Ian managing the site. Will has imported the initial contribution into SVN (under asf/incubator/httpd/cli/). Next steps are documented in status, first posts will be sent to this list this week. mod_aspdotnet should have an initial release soon, followed by the refactoring of code to support an Apache.Web model that is entirely independent of the Microsoft ASP.NET technology, usable in C# with one of several CLI environments, including mono. The cli-dev team would like to thank Noel and Sander for their advise and handholding through initial mailing list creation, SVN setup, and general guidance on the incubation process. Status report for HTTPD-CLI ======================================== * The Axion development team has (lazily) approved to sign the software grant. The comment period on this has expired. The grant should be signed and faxed this week. * A request has been made to infrastructure to create the db-axion CVS module, as well as the axion-dev and axion-user mailing lists. * Some members of the infrastruture team have volunteered to assist in importing the Axion CVS tree (with history) from Tigris to Apache. * Once the appropriate infrastructure pieces are in place, we need to: (1) cut a terminal release from Tigris, (2) move the code base and discussion over to those apache resources. ----------------------------------------- Attachment L: Status report for the Apache James Project Pretty quiet quarter: What code releases have been made? James 2.2.0 was officially released. Legal issues: Nothing that requires board attention. Cross-project issues: I would like to claim we're working on a 3.0 release that will incorporate a newer published release of Avalon, but I can't say I know precisely what that means or gets us (besides known source code we're running on as 2.x runs against unreleased/inaccessible code). ----------------------------------------- Attachment M: Status report for the Apache Maven Project o New projects None, but the maven-components repository is now fleshed out with the makings for maven2. There is a lot of code that has been added over the last couple months. o New PMC members None. o New Committers John D. Casey (maven - core) Tryve Laugstol (maven - core) o Goings on We finally managed to release the 1.0 of Maven and now we're forging ahead preparing the the alpha-1 release of Maven 2. I waited until the 1.0 was released before doing the alpha-1 of Maven 2. Brett Porter forged on to complete the release while myself, Michal, Emmanuel, Trygve and John Casey worked on Maven 2. Maven 2 has the distinct difference of originally entirely written by myself. So in terms of developer involvement there is a stark difference between maven 1 and maven 2. With Maven 1 users are essentially at the mercy of what Brett and I know about Maven 1 whereas off the hop with Maven 2 we've got 5 people in maven land in addition to a half dozen other folks who could manage their way around Maven as it's a plexus application (a container akin to phoenix and merlin but made specifically for embeddability and Maven 2). I am also preparing to release Continuum which is a continuous integration tool for Maven projects. I hired one of the committers, who is a student, for the summer to finish the first release of Maven and it's now finished and will be released the alpha-1 of Maven 2. We are also planning on doing a release soon of Maven Wagon and Maven SCM. Maven Wagon is used extensively in Maven 2 and Maven SCM is used extensively in Continuum. ----------------------------------------- Attachment N: Status report for the Apache Struts Project We have started a reorganization of our repository. The goals of the refactoring are to better support subprojects with their own release cycles and building Struts with Apache Maven. An initial draft of the reorganization is being done under Subversion on a private server, with all discussions taking place on the public DEV list. We will be ready to move the work to an Apache server soon, now that we have a consensus in favor of Subversion and Maven. We completed a draft of Apache Struts bylaws and developer guidelines, which is available at . There was a discussion on the DEV list regarding the "bar" for Committership. The consensus is to keep the bar set fairly high and wait until a contributor has submitted a good number of useful patches directly to Struts. Our latest stable release is still 1.1 (29 June 2003). We issued a 1.2.1 release on 11 July 2004, which is currently catagorized as a beta. We anticipate 1.2.1 (or a 1.2.2) being promoted to GA over the next 30 days. ----------------------------------------- Attachment O: Status report for the Apache TCL Project Not much to report. We added Pat Thoyts as a committer to take care of Rivet on windows, which has been something that needed doing for a long time, but that no one else had resources to handle. Ronnie Brunner has kept our web site up to date and functioning with some improved code for the Websh section. We released a new Rivet version some months ago. A new version in the works will have a compatibility layer for the tcl standard library's cgi handler, making Rivet useful to more people. ----------------------------------------- Attachment P: Status report for the Conference Planning Committee o Security Travel has been selected to produce the ApacheCon/US series of conferences for five years; Software and Support Verlag has been chosen to do the next conference in Europe. Contracts for both are being negociated. o The Call for Participation has been sent out; fifty two (52) submissions have been received to date. o We are working with OSCOM to provide content for the ApacheTracks streams there. We will be holding the scheduling meeting for ApacheCon 2004/US around 7 August 2004. ----------------------------------------- Attachment Q: Status report for the Security Team ----------------------------------------- Attachment R: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project === Status === Prior to his departure, Geir started some discussion (PMC list) concerning Jakarta charter revisions and the various documents describing the governance of Jakarta. The current documents are quite out of date in places - "The number of PMC seats is set at seven". Expect more on this. The PMC resolved a lack of oversight issue concerning the tomcat-security list, and two committers have stepped up to moderate it. Equally, the General list turned out to be lacking many moderators, so one of the themes for the next month may be to double-check our moderation coverage. Discussions on improved download pages to make it easier for user's to download distributions and more obvious on how to handle PGP/MD5 signatures have occured on the general list. Dion Gillard has volunteered to be a Junior Apmail Apprentice to try and take some of common workload off of infrastructure. === Releases === ==== April ==== * Commons Net 1.2.0 * Jetspeed 1.5 * Tapestry 3.0 * Velocity 1.4 ==== May ==== * Cactus 1.6, 1.6.1 * Commons IO 1.0 * Commons Net 1.2.1 * Tomcat 5.0.24 * Slide 2.0 * Velocity Tools 1.1 ==== June ==== * Commons Collections 2.1.1, 3.1 * Commons DBCP 1.2, 1.2.1 * Commons Logging 1.0.4 * Commons Net 1.2.2 * Commons Pool 1.2 * Tomcat 5.0.27 Beta ==== July ==== * Tomcat 5.0.27 Stable * Commons Betwixt 0.5 * HiveMind 1.0-beta-1 === Community changes === ==== May ==== The following were all added to the Jakarta PMC: * Jeff Dever * Mark Diggory * James Taylor * Mark Thomas * Michael Becke * Oleg Kalnichevski * Steve Cohen * Adrian Sutton * Ortwin Gluck * Daniel Florey * Martin Holz ==== June ==== * Emmanuel Bourg joins as a committer to Commons. * Matthew Inger joins as a Jakarta committer. * Knut Wannheden joins as a committer to HiveMind. * Roy Winston joins as a committer to Commons. * Geir Magnusson Jr resigning as PMC Chair, Henri Yandell taking over. ==== July ==== * Travis Savo joins as a committer. * James M. Mason joins as a committer to Slide. Four new PMC members have been voted on to the PMC and will be passed onto the board when they have all replied. === Subproject news === (** implies report based on the mailing lists by the chair) ==== Alexandria ** ==== (dormant project) ==== BCEL ** ==== User list is active, Dev list is less so. ==== BSF ** ==== Again, User list is active, Dev list is less so. ==== Cactus ** ==== User list very active, dev list very quiet, mainly automated emails. I believe a Cactus-2 is in the planning. ==== Commons ** ==== Commons has, as always, been very active. Outside of the components themselves, work over the last quarter has gone into the build and site generation system using Maven. * Chain was promoted from the Sandbox to Commons Proper. ==== Commons HttpClient ==== * 2.0.1 and 3.0 alpha 2 releases are planned for the near future. * HttpClient plans to move to the Jakarta level after version 3.0 ==== ECS ** ==== The developer list has been quiet for the last quarter. Occasional questions are asked on the user list. ==== HiveMind ==== HiveMind is moving steadily towards an initial beta release. ==== JMeter ** ==== Very active user and dev lists. The JMeter sub-community appears to be busily working on bugfixing. ==== Lucene ==== Lucene 1.4 Final has been released. ==== ORO ==== Pattern matching engine factories were added in response to needs expressed by Commons, including a wrapper for J2SE 1.4 java.util.regex. Also, subpackages were separated out into separate jars for users who need only one pattern matching engine and are sensitive to jar file size. A combined jar with everything is still provided as users fall into two camps on this issues. More discussion of ORO has occurred on commons-dev than on oro-dev recently. There's no ETA for the next release, which will probably be version 2.1. ==== POI ==== Work on the next release of POI has been ongoing, but no release date has been set. ==== Regexp ==== Nothing happened this month. No release date for the next release, 1.4, has been set. ==== Slide ==== Slide 2.1 release is under preparation including lots of nice new features. A first beta is to be expected in August. CVS will branch with the release of this beta. ==== Taglibs ** ==== The sub-community is largely dealing with user queries concerning JSTL and the Standard tag-library, Apache's implementation of JSTL. A new version of the String taglib was released in May. A new sandbox taglib, datagrid, was also added in May. ==== Tapestry ==== Work on the next release of Tapestry, Tapestry 3.1, based on a new infrastructure provided by HiveMind, has begun. In addition, some annoyances in the final Tapestry 3.0 release may result in a 3.0.1 bugfix release. ==== Tomcat ==== The Tomcat CVS has branched, creating a TOMCAT_5_0 branch for continuing maintenance on Tomcat 5.0.x releases, and allowing work on Tomcat 5.1 to begin. For some discussion about Tomcat 5.1 features and changes, search the tomcat-dev mailing list archives for threads whose subject contains "5.next." ==== Turbine ==== To make the creation of Web applications using Turbine easier, a plugin for Maven has been designed and is currently tested in the 2.3 branch of the Turbine framework. Some work towards the 2.4 release is going on, but no release date has been set. ==== Velocity ==== Both user and dev lists are active, but project is stable and widely used. Upcoming plan is to release a new core 1.4.1 because of a non-backwards compatible change made to in the 1.4 release that prevents people from using a 'word' token in a directive other than in #macro() call or a #foreach(). This bit users of the Webwork framework (and probably others) and will revert back with a log notice that the feature is deprecated. After that is planned the core 1.5 release of current features in CVS, and then a large pile of new features in patch form including floating-point support as core 1.6. The Tools part of the project is at version 1.1. ==== Watchdog ==== The PMC discussed the status of Watchdog. It is a dormant project with no active committers. However, it is still used by Tomcat as part of Tomcat's release testing. In addition, the PMC would like to retain the option of future work on Watchdog, so the web site and accompanying materials will not be removed. A dormancy notice has been placed on the Watchdog web page and the mailing list subscription links replaced with a note to use general@jakarta. ----------------------------------------- Attachment S: Status report for the Apache Avalon Project Status Report for Avalon: July 21 2004 Stephen McConnell has resigned from the PMC and resigned his committer status within Avalon. The Avalon PMC and developer community are currently discussing "next steps" though things have calmed down considerably over the last two days (since Stephen's resignation). There are a number of decisions being considered which include: * Some internal restructuring of Avalon to partition the traditional framework development from newer container (merlin) development * Separating new Merlin development out into a new project, either directly to a TLP or to the incubator. * Possibly "freezing" or otherwise shutting down Avalon, particularly framework development (which is fairly stable). And a host of other options. The good news that I do want to report is that I am confident with Stephen's resignation the remainder of the community is capable of finding a path forward in the best interest of the ASF, the developers, and our users. We will be consulting with the newly formed Excalibur project and other Avalon dependent projects during this restructuring process. Currently I believe we're all a little drained from recent events and need a few days to regroup. ----------------------------------------- Attachment T: Status report for the Apache SpamAssassin Project Highlights of Events from the last month: * Pre-releases: SpamAssassin 3.0.0-pre1, SpamAssassin 3.0.0-pre2 The project is zeroing in on our 3.0.0 release, we've completed the first set of mass-checks (contributors submit corpora results and they are used to train the score optimizer). pre3 should be coming out in the next few days, followed by the second set of mass-checks, and then we will put out a release candidate. * New committer: Henry Stern (author of the perceptron that will do the score optimizations for SpamAssassin 3.0) * ASF integration (moving from the incubator to TLP status and transitioning away from a few bits of remaining non-ASF infrastructure) continues at a slow, but steady pace. The web site is completely transitioned and under SVN control, lists are moving from incubator to TLP, we're in the process of moving the spamassassin.org domain registration. Two issues: a private non-ASF list that has been used for communication with other anti-spammers (privacy is competing with transparency) and Jira's non-open-source licensing resulted in a veto on moving to Jira, and the ASF bugzilla is reportedly undersupported, so we're still using our own bugzilla (supported by our committers and a contributor at an ISP) for the time being. * We can't claim credit for the integration work, but we have heard that installing SpamAssassin on the ASF mail servers has helped quite a bit, and we have helped out a bit with DNSBL selection. :-) * We are holding a logo contest to replace our old project logo: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/LogoContest ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the August 18, 2004 board meeting.