TLC Meeting April 23, 2008

The TLC met by teleconference on April 23, 2008 at 1:30 PM EST.

Agenda

1. Brad's version numbering proposal
2. Policy on circular dependencies
3. Proposal for different treatment of dependencies
4. Secretary e-mail
5. COIN PGP key?
6. Proposal for version info
7. Cross-compilation with mingw32msvc
8. Proposal for binary distribution
9. Another bug squashing party?
10. Summer meeting time

Notes

1. There was a discussion of Brad's version numbering proposal. The consensus was that using dates as version numbers would not be a problem as long as the general convention of using stable version numbers of the form x.y and release version numbers of the form x.y.z was adhered top in order to ensure the scripts used to create releases do not break.
2. There was another discussion of the circular dependency issue. This discussion quickly devolved into a discussion of dependencies in general and nothing was decided (see below).
3. The rather difficult and open-ended question of whether we should switch to a completely different model of handling dependencies was raised. Motivation: there was a bug in CoinFactorization and the fix was trivial. But once a new release of CoinUtils is made, this triggers a new release of many other projects (Clp, Osi, Cgl, Cbc, SYMPHONY, etc.), even though all that has changed is a tiny piece of code that does not affect the callers (not even the virtual tables). Binary compatibility remains. How can we get this change automatically into all the dependent projects? A different paradigm is required in which the dependencies are done differently than currently and projects are treated more as independent entities. In such a model, only compatibility at the API level would be considered. Such a paradigm has much to recommend it, but switching would be a major, long-term project. No conclusion was reached and it was decided to continue discussion at the next TLC meeting.
4. A question was raised about who gets the e-mail addressed to "secretary". Apparently, some e-mail that has gone to this address has remained unanswered. The secretary position is currently in transition and Matt will look into it.
5. Matt said that we do not have a PGP key as far as he knows, so Leo volunteered to get us one.
6. Laci suggested creating a function method called fooVersion() in project foo that would print out the svn revision number and repository path of the code that's checked out and is compiled into the executable? Even better, it's own version and then call the version of each underlying project. Then, e.g., CbcVersion() would invoke CoinUtilsVersion(), ClpVersion(), etc. and that way if someone reports a bug they can just include the exact version of everything where they have found the bug. Discussion of this propsal was also tabled until next meeting.
7. Remaining items were tabled.

Respectfully submitted,

Ted Ralphs, TLC Chair