TLC Meeting January 30, 2007

The TLC met by teleconference on January 30, 2007 at 1:00 PM EST.

Agenda

• Update on creation of static Web pages (see notes below)
• Project categorization (see notes below)
• Update on creation of CoinAll project (see notes below)
• Automated build and test procedures (see notes below)
• Update on standardizing the content and location of README, INSTALL, and AUTHORS files.
• Installation verification tests
• Dual licensing issues

Notes

Creation of Static Web Pages

In the past project managers have expressed the desire that their project's home page should be some sort of static home page, not the Trac page. Currently, this is done by creating a subdirectory in the CoinWeb repository for each project, but it would be nice to have all the pages associated with each project contained within the project's SVN repository. After discussion, it was agreed that the following policy will be adopted and implemented.

• http://www.coin-or.org/PROJ will go to the static pages associated with PROJ, while http://projects.coin-or.org/PROJ will go to the Trac page of PROJ.
• The static pages of project PROJ will be kept in svn in a directory named html/ in the root of the project's repository (so it can be checked out with svn co https://projects.coin-or.org/svn/PROJ/html PROJ-html). Anytime anything is committed into this directory, a post-commit script will automatically push the changes out to the web site. This will make it easy for PMs to maintain their own static pages. The existing static pages from the CoinWeb SVN repository will be copied to the project's html subdirectory using a script that preserves history as well.
• We will provide a default index.html for each project that doesn't have static pages, which will redirect to the project's Trac page. Thus, for each project that does not have a static index.html, the Trac page will automatically be displayed.
• In the list of the projects, the link provided will be to http://www.coin-or.org/PROJ (the static home page) of each project. It was also decided that for now, all pages on projects.coin-or.org should be secure (accessed through https://projects.coin-or.org/) until such time as server load becomes an issue.

Project Categorization

It was decided to create two new categories on the project listing page: Interfaces and Modeling Systems. In addition, it was decided to change Infrastructure to Developer Tools. It is possible that a project may be listed in more than one category under the new system.

Creating Testing Protocols for COIN

Bill Hart is working on generalizing the testing framework he developed for Acro to make it easily applicable to other codes, including COIN. He has currently set up nightly builds for a selected subset of COIN projects, which can be viewed at

http://software.sandia.gov/~sqe/testdata/coin/today/summary.html

In addition, there is a codechecks script that tries to figure out whether externals are out of date. The codechecks info can be viewed at

http://software.sandia.gov/~sqe/testdata/coin/today/code_checks.txt

The following are currently set up:

coin-codechecks	Tests external links in coinall to see if they're up to date
coin-coinall	Builds coinall
coin-trunkall	Checks out trunk versions of all of the coinall subdirs, and tries to build.

The coin-coinall builds are going fine. The coin-trunkall builds are failing. Note that it is possible to follow a link to view a log of the build failure.

To move the project forward and allow further development, it was agreed that we will set up a development project (proposed names CoinBench or CoinRegression) in the COIN-OR repository with Bill Hart as the project manager. Once the project is set up, Bill will work with project managers to get buy-in and move forward with further functionality.

Automated Build and Test

As part of the process for releasing a new stable version of the build tools, we've recently built a variety of projects on a number of different platforms. This process is now somewhat automated for some common platforms. It would be relatively easy to make the output from these tests, as well as the binaries, available to project managers. Ted will look into the possibility of automatically creating binary packages from these tests and posting them on the Web.