TLC Meeting February 16, 2006

The TLC met on 2/16/06 by teleconference. The meeting was called to order by the chair at 4:05 PM EST.

Agenda

1. Committee Reports

   • Committee on stable releases and versioning (StableReleases).
   • Committee on distribution of binaries (BinaryDistribution).
   • Committee on moving the repository to subversion (MoveToSubversion).
   • Submissions manager

2. Old Business

   • Decision-making procedures

3. New Business

   • Moving grandfathered projects through the acceptance process
   • Trac sites
   • Project classification (See ProjectCategories)
   • Build system update
   • Procedures for bringing on new project managers
   • Procedures for Web site going down
   • Regular meeting schedule

Notes

In Attendance:

• Laci Ladanyi
• JP Fasano
• Francois Margot
• Kipp Martin
• Ted Ralphs
• Andreas Wächter

Committee Reports

1. The committee on stable releases and versioning (StableReleases) is inactive and waiting for the move to subversion before continuing their work.

2. Committee on distribution of binaries (BinaryDistribution) now has a project page (http://projects.coin-or.org/CoinBinary) and is currently in the process of putting the finishing touches on the first collection of binary distributions. These will be posted to the Web site when they are ready. Other TLC members are asked to help out by downloading these and using them once they are ready.

3. The committee on moving the repository to subversion (MoveToSubversion) announced that there is a tentative plan in place to leave the current directory structure in place, i.e., to allow codes to be checked out into a directory structure that looks basically like the current one. A point of controversy, about which there was extensive discussion was how to treat dependencies. Subversion has the ability to specify that a given project depends on a particular version of another project, so that if project A is checked out, then a specified version of project B will also be checked out. However, this means that if projects A and B depend on two different versions of project C, then then proects A and B cannot coexist in a single source tree. There was a good deal of discussion as to whether this kind of dependency checking is a good thing or not. The committee will take the discussion under advisement and post a final recommendation for a directory structure to the committee page before the next meeting.

Old Business

1. Discussion of the decision-making procedures was tabled again.

New Business

1. Projects that were grandfathered when the Foundation was created and have not been through the project acceptance process will be taken through that process. The TLC chair will assign TLC members to take each grandfathered project through the project acceptance procedures. This will provide a good test of the procedures, as well as engender greater familiarity with the procedures among TLC members. The SLB sill take care of the legal paperwork.

2. As part of the process of taking grandfathered projects through the project acceptance process and in conjunction with the move to subversion, all projects will get Trac pages. The TLC will discuss the desirability of a uniform look and feel to these pages at a future meeting.

3. The chair asked that everyone take a look at the strawman project classification scheme (ProjectCategories) and provide feedback by the next meeting.

4. It was announced that a complete overhaul of the current build system is almost completed. The new build system will have a single global configuration file, explicit project dependency specification, support for Microsoft compilers, and many other useful features. There was a lengthy discussion of how to treat external library dependencies and whether each project should have its own configuration file. A consensus was reached and the new system should be ready in a day or two.

5. The discussion of procedures for bringing on new project managers was tabled.

6. There was discussion regarding the procedure that should be followed by project managers when the COIN-OR Web site is down. It was thought that it is too much to expect 24/7 support from the maintainer of the server, who is a volunteer. The procedure should generally be up to the maintainer (currently Matt). However, if the INFORMS Web site is also down, there probably isn't much that can be done from our end, so that is the first thing to check. If the INFORMS Web site is up and the COIN-OR Web site is down, Matt should be notified (probably by e-mail).

7. The TLC will continue meeting every third Thursday at 4:00 PM EST for the foreseeable future.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:36 PM EST.

Respectfully submitted,

Ted Ralphs TLC Chair