Re: Classpath Meeting Minutes (2005-10-07)

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 02:49 +0200, Robert Schuster wrote:
> GNU Classpath Meeting Minutes from 2005-10-07 17:00 UTC

Thanks for making the minutes Robert.

> Basically, Mark explained, he could not believe that everything is going on
> smoothly. He studied Apache's procedures and asked the attendents whether 
> these
> would be useful for Classpath, too.
> 
> However everybody seemed happy with the way it is and Mark was a surprized 
> that
> people seem so happy to hack on GNU Classpath while the project has no real
> formal structure.

Just to be clear. There is a "formal structure" as outlined in our
Hacking Guide <http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/hacking.html>.
But we are very light on procedures. Basically the only formality is
making sure the legal side is correctly handled. After that the "rules"
are more like gentlemen agreements. We expect people to play nice,
listen to each other and take each others opinion seriously.
This seems to work just fine. Tom Tromey said that we should not impose
any extra procedures unless there is a clear need. For example because
people are actively behaving in an "anti-social" manner. And that time
has (luckily!) not come.

> Mark was worried about introducing dependencies on Gtk+-2.8 and Cairo-1.0.0 .
> These would be a necessity of the AWT rework[0]. Sven added that he does not
> expect these changes before 0.19 .
> 
> Unfortunately Thomas was not present to discuss the item so we remained at
> postponing any major AWT rework to a time after the November release.

Lets try a release in the first week of November then. We could set the
release date a bit earlier if Tom, or anybody else, wants to start the
migration to 2.8 earlier. Just to make sure that we have one more
release that doesn't need a "bleeding edge" gtk+ version. But we will
need modern versions of various libraries in the end anyway to support
all the cool stuff we want to have. So we could also just bite the
bullet early if that is more convenient.

> Integration of GNU Crypto was mentioned and that we have to wait for Casey's
> rewrite of it. Mark stated that Casey would be the only one being able to do 
> the
> integration nicely.

s/GNU Crypto/Jessie/
Casey Marshall is working on NIO support in Jessie
<http://jessie.nongnu.org/>. Jessie is packaged for the various
distributions. But various people (on the Jessie mailinglist) had
trouble getting the latest release integrated with the latest inetlib
and classpath releases.

> Mark liked the idea of the FreeSwingApplications page[1] which Robert set up. 
> He
> hoped to see more lists of free software applications (running on GNU 
> Classpath).

I added a couple of small applications (jtetris, foxhunt, torero) that
basically work, but have some corner cases that behave wrongly. Those
might be motivating for people to look at instead of the larger ones
that might need lots of work. (Note that JUnit should really also be in
this list. It does have some small irregularities with drop down menus
for example.)

> That was it - Everybody seemed to have enjoyed the meeting. In fact people we 
> in
> such a good mood that nobody asked for the date of the next meeting. Perhaps
> this will be solved on the main discussion mailing list.

Maybe we don't need a formal meeting on irc at all? I liked having
everybody around (there were around 40 people on irc at the time). But
it seems like we do fine already without "official meetings" anyway.

Cheers,

Mark

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