Incubator board report, December 2012
Shepherd Assignments
Dave Fisher: Allura, Etch
Matt Franklin: HCatalog
Matt Hogstrom: Ripple, Kalumet
Ross Gardler: Wave, Open Meeting
Roman Shaposhnik: cTakes, S4
Suresh Marru: Drill
Alan Cabrera: Flex, Hadoop Development Tools
This is the first report with me (Benson) in the chair. I want to call out thanks to Jukka and others for helping me get off the ground with my chair duties, and, of course, to again thank Jukka for his service. As documented below, the incubator has had some exits and some entrances. We continue to have vigorous discussions on how to achieve appropriate supervision and coaching of podlings and how to approach small, slow, or otherwise doubtful projects. As with all matters of this volunteer foundation, calling people out for not doing things is not a viable long-term strategy. From time to time, we lose mentor involvement, and as a community we have to find more and better ways of serving podlings that suffer from this problem. o Community New IPMC members: Fabian Christ, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Andrew Hart People who left the IPMC: Chris Douglas o New Podlings oo Hadoop Development Tools oo Marmotta o Graduations The board has motions for the following: oo Wink oo OpenMeeting oo Flex The IPMC voted to endorse the adoption of the Nuvem podling into the Tuscany TLP. o Releases Apache Flex SDK Installer 1.0-incubating released (16 Nov) Apache Bloodhound 0.3 incubating Released (4 Dec) o Legal / Trademarks o Infrastructure -------------------- Summary of podling reports -------------------- Still getting started at the Incubator These projects are still getting started, so no immediate progress towards graduation is yet expected. o Hadoop Development Tools o Drill o Marmotta o Onami o Streams Not yet ready to graduate o Allura o Helix o Kalumet o S4 o Wave Ready to graduate o Bloodhound (* there is a bit of diversity of opinion here) o cTAKES o Etch o HCatalog o Openmeeting o Flex -------------------- Allura Allura is forge software for the development of software projects, including source control systems, issue tracking, discussion, wiki, and other software project management tools. Allura has been incubating since June 2012. Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation: 1. Grow the community 2. Move project development to ASF hardware 3. Continue to remove non-AL code from the repo Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of? No issues at this time How has the community developed since the last report? We have invited three new members to the PPMC - Alvaro del Castillo, Peter Hartmann, and Stefano Invernizzi. With their addition, 5 out of 8 of the committers are employees of SourceForge. Additional contributions from yet another person, Jon Schewe, have been received also (pending merge). Primary development has moved from the SourceForge git repo to the Apache git repo. How has the project developed since the last report? Work is in progress to remove GPLed code from the distribution, and making it an external dependency, moving us closer to having code that we can release under the Apache License. A report of the project's activity can be see at http://bitergia.com/public/previews/allura/2012_12_allura/ which was generated using code that is in the process of being moved into the Allura git repo from Bitergia, the employer of one of our new PPMC members. Name search has been concluded and approved. Meanwhile, code commits have been steady and mailing list traffic has been moderate. Signed-off-by: Rich Bowen (rbowen), rgardler, wave Shepherd note: (wave) Allura has recently accomplished their first goal of diversity. I think that they are on a good trajectory for 2 and 3. Then Release and Graduation! -------------------- Bloodhound Bloodhound is an issue tracker derivative of Trac, with the goal of making deployment easy, and usage intuitive. Bloodhound has been incubating since December 2011. The top three issues that need to be addressed to move toward graduation are: 1. Improve community diversity 2. Growth of user community 3. Lowering the barrier to entry and development Since the last report, Bloodhound has successfully created two more releases. The problems highlighted in the September report, regarding the use of an external site for the download of some of the dependencies, have been largely solved by working with their maintainers to ensure that their packages are available through a standard location (pypi). Releases themselves are beginning to become a little more routine although the time between the initiation of the vote for release of 0.2.0 and the subsequent announcement of the result was of concern. In contrast the 0.3.0 release was significantly smoother. Three new committers have been added to the project and they have driven considerable conversation on the mailing lists in a relatively short time. The barriers to contributing have been reduced significantly and we plan to continue to work on this area. In addition to the identification of tickets that are suitable for newcomers we now have documentation of aspects of ticket management and the workflow that we use. Proposals for larger enhancements are also documented on the wiki in such a way that they reflect the decisions made on the project dev mailing list, reducing the work associated with digging through the mailing list. From the infrastructure side the project has two open requests. One of these requests was opened in July, requesting a means for the Bloodhound source browser to have effective access to a local copy of the svn repository. Alternatives have been suggested but there is no obvious resolution to this issue at this point. Signed-off-by: brane, jukka -------------------- cTAKES cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) is a natural language processing (NLP) tool for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. cTAKES was voted into the Incubator by the IPMC on Monday, June 11, 2012. Three most important steps moving towards graduation Attract new contributors Make at least one cTAKES release Get everyone's ICLA on file and start developing code at Apache and using the infrastructure Anything required IPMC attention? None Community: We have had additional committers and PPMC members join. We have the Software Grants on file from the necessary institutions(CTAKES-2). We have been using JIRA tickets to replace the Bugs tickets. We have been actively using the ASF mailing lists for communication, with over 328 mails in ctakes-dev@ in Nov. We have initiated a discussion on the road towards graduation (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ctakes-dev/201211.mbox/%3C924DE05C19409B438EB81DE683A942D923C405%40CHEXMBX1A.CHBOSTON.ORG%3E) Development: We successfully migrated the cTAKES codebase from SourceForge to ASF SVN. We have been successfully using Maven builds and ASF Nexus for staging our development. We have integrated cTAKES with continuous integration using ASF Jenkins. We have updated the code base to include ASF copyright headers to source files. We have integrated the Apache RAT plug-in for Audit. We have updated the README/LICENSE files appropriately. We have a release candidate (3.0.0-incubating) pending Review/Vote. The ctakes-dev@ discussions have been active. Signed-off-by: gsingers, jukka, rvs, mattmann -------------------- Project Name: Apache Drill Project Summary: Issues: Discussions on these key areas were __very focused__ and productive toward this project's graduation goals: 1.) Logical Plan Expressions, syntax, and parser 2.) Schema-less Management 3.) Wire Protocols User interest has increased (thanks to the media) and as the project's source commitments increase so will user interaction within the next quarter. How has the community developed since the last report: Discussion counts have gotten smaller from the month of October through November 2012. For all intents and purposes initial code was checked in and builds running during the middle of October 2012 and from that time focused discussion and development have occurred. Many new users joined the list as well as asking formally to be part of the community. List Summary: * http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-drill-dev/ * Dec 2012, [current], 264 subscribers * Nov 2012, 73 (jira, focused discussions) * Oct 2012, 214 (svn, discussions, jira) * Sep 2012, 413 * Aug 2012, 85 == Focused Discussions == Discussions on these key areas were __very focused__ and productive toward this project's graduation goals: 1.) Logical Plan Expressions, syntax, and parser 2.) Schema-less Management 3.) Wire Protocols How has the project developed since the last report: == Milestones == 1.) During the month of October, the SVN repository was initiated and initial source checked in. 2.) ~88% of JIRA tasks were created during the months October through November, showing growth and healthy discussion. 3.) Post initial commit, many users have come forth asking to engage in active development, showing healthy growth and interrest amongst the developer community at large regarding the goals of this project. Signed-off-by: tdunning, berndf, gsingers, isabel -------------------- Etch Etch is a cross-platform, language- and transport-independent framework for building and consuming network services. The Etch toolset includes a network service description language, a compiler, and binding libraries for a variety of programming languages. Status: Development The implementation of the binding-cpp has now reached beta status. We are currently in the stabilizing and tests phase and are planning to do the release within the next month. Graduation status The graduation proposal and the composition of the PMC are currently in discussion. We are planning to vote for the graduation proposal and the PMC Chair in calendar week 50 and then start the discussion on general@incubator mailing list afterwards. Community: In order to present Etch to a wider audience we have filed another proposal for the ApacheCon NA 2013. Furthermore we are planning to put some more effort into the growing of the community next year e.g. by using screencasts and writing a tutorial. Future Tasks: - Finish graduation process - Release of Etch 1.3.0 - Community development Mentor note (Dashorst): The processes in this podling are really like trying to pour molasses through a funnel in the winter. That said, I do think that the project is viable and an Apache community albeit a small, slow moving one. Given the nature of the project and its usage in automobile technology I don't think it will ever be as fast moving as a web or big data project. And that is not a bad thing for this type of software IMO. Shepherd note (Wave): Molasses is apt. I think that they do need to actually vote on graduate. I hope that they actually do. I think it should be a greater priority than a release. Signed-off-by: dashorst, cutting, wave -------------------- Flex Apache Flex is an application framework for easily building Flash-based applications for mobile devices, the browser and desktop. Date of entry to the Incubator: December 31, 2011 Top three items to resolve before graduation: Flex has their graduation resolution on the agenda for the December board meeting. Is there anything that the Incubator PMC or ASF Board specifically needs to address? Only the graduation resolution. Are there any legal, infrastructure, cross-project or personal issues that need to be addressed? (Are there any stumbling blocks that impede the podling?) The Flex community really wants to move from SVN to Git/GitHub. We are eager to see Infra fully support read/write Git repos. Also, we are still waiting for INFRA-4380 (import the old Flex JIRA data) to be resolved. Check that the project's Incubation Status file up to date. http://incubator.apache.org/projects/flex What has been done (releases, milestones, etc.) since the last report? -We approved 6 new committers -We released Apache Flex SDK Installer 1.0.9-incubating. -Adobe Systems Inc. donated both the Falcon compiler and the FalconJS cross-compiler. -Christopher Dutz donated Maven support tools for Flex -We voted to graduate. -We started work on a next-generation of Flex designed to target browsers and devices without Flash. What are the plans and expectations for the next period? -Go through the transition to being a TLP -Continue with the next-generation Flex work -Release several bug-fixes and new locales in the current Flex code base. Are there any recommendations for how incubation could run more smoothly for you? No. We thank you for your support. Signed off by mentor: Dave Fisher (wave), Greg Reddin (greddin), bdelacretaz, adc -------------------- HCatalog HCatalog is a table and storage management service for data created using Apache Hadoop. HCatalog entered Apache incubator in March 2011. What has the project accomplished since the last report? * Received patches from 6 committers and 10 contributors * Preparing for next release What are the top 2-3 things to resolve before graduation? The community has been discussing graduation and becoming a subproject of Hive. The email thread discussing that can be found at [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-hcatalog-user/201209.mbox/%3C08C40723-8D4D-48EB-942B-8EE4327DD84A%40hortonworks.com%3E] and [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-hcatalog-user/201210.mbox/%3CCABN7xTCRM5wXGgJKEko0PmqDXhuAYpK%2BD-H57T29zcSGhkwGQw%40mail.gmail.com%3E] Based on that we opened a discussion with the Hive community at [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hive-dev/201211.mbox/%3CC648B9DE-2088-465E-8FA1-590D5E192093%40hortonworks.com%3E] These discussions are still on going. Signed-off-by: Alan Gates (gates) -------------------- Hadoop Development Tools Eclipse based tools for developing applications on the Hadoop platform. Entered 11/09/2012 Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation: - Finish on boarding the podling. Including infra work (waiting on a git repository to be created see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-5512), completing the podlings.xml and then IP clearance for code and committers. - Porting and releasing existing codebase to support multiple versions of Hadoop in a single IDE instance. During this time building understanding of the Apache processes around working and releasing. - Grow the podling community in terms of users and contributors. Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of? - As mentioned above, we have been waiting on https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-5512 for over three weeks, not having our git repository is a big barrier to progress. How has the community developed since the last report? - The only change in the community was the withdrawal of Chris Douglas as mentor, replaced by Suresh Marru. - Committers are currently in the process of filing ICLAs How has the project developed since the last report? - The project hasn't moved a lot due to not yet completing the podling on boarding. Signed-off-by: rvs, smarru, mattmann, adc -------------------- Helix Helix entered incubation on 14 October 2012. Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation: - Increase visibility and develop the community by blogs, better documentation and new use cases. - Identify existing distributed systems that can benefit from using Helix. Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of? - None How has the community developed since the last report? - 9 Jiras created, 3 resolved. - Low activity on user mailing lists. Users @18 , Dev @15 How has the project developed since the last report? - Ready for first release. - In progress: Enhancement of Apache S4 using Helix. - Still working on stabilizing tests that depend on time. - Additional use cases/recipes with documentation. Signed-off-by: olamy, phunt, rvs -------------------- Kalumet Apache Kalumet is a complete platform to administrate data center. It covers the operating system tasks, middleware provisioning, etc. Kalumet entered incubation in September 2011. Community Developement: We submitted Kalumet 0.6.0-incubating release to vote. A talk has been submitted to ApacheCon NA. This talk is an introduction to Kalumet, a presentation of the current features and present the roadmap. Project Development: We created the Jira corresponding to the changes that we want to include in Kalumet 0.7.0-incubating release. We decided to increase the release cycle in order to give more visibility to the users. We completed a first documentation. The documentation is part of the 0.6.0-incubating release and is also available directly on the website. Before Graduation: we identified "high" priority features/changes for 0.7.0-incubating release. Kscripts and different "ecosystems" (OSGi, JavaEE, etc) providers could be included in this release. Post Graduation: Kalumet scripts. It's the extension of the "software" concept globally to all Kalumet resources. It will allow users to create custom deployment/update plan, with a set of fine-grained steps. Refactoring of the UI. Currently Kalumet Console uses Echo2 framework. It's a category B license framework. We plan to refactore the console to use a new framework. Web Site/Communication Development: The website has been updated with the documentation. Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of: None so far. Signed-off-by: jbonofre,olamy -------------------- Marmotta Apache Marmotta provides an open implementation of a Linked Data Platform that can be used, extended, and deployed easily by organizations who want to publish Linked Data or to build custom applications on Linked Data. Marmotta entered incubation December 3rd 2012. The project is getting started in the incubator. Mailing lists have been created, and the project initial committers are getting ICLAs on file. Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of: None Signed-off-by: andy@, fchrist@, nandana IPMC comments: -------------------- Onami Apache Onami is a project focused on the development and maintenance of a set of Google Guice extensions not provided out of the box by the library itself nor the Google developers team, such as integration with 3rd part frameworks or extra functionalities. Onami entered incubation on 14 November 2012. The Onami has ramped up and the project has been successfully migrated to the ASF. Currently there is a high activity to change code and site to match ASF branding & licensing requirements. Discussions on new developments have already been started. The site has been deployed: http://onami.incubator.apache.org Signed-off-by: grobmeier -------------------- Openmeetings Openmeetings provides video conferencing, instant messaging, white board, collaborative document editing and other groupware tools using API functions of the Red5 Streaming Server for Remoting and Streaming. OpenMeetings entered the incubation on November 12, 2011. Project and community status: * Roadmap for OpenMeetings 2.1 and 3.0 has been discussed http://markmail.org/message/ugazdo4xgclakrib Version 3.0 is mainly about a HTML5 version of OpenMeetings. Discussion resolution was to choose Wicket as basic JavaScript framework and jQuery for pure client side tasks. By now we did already implement an HTML5 interface for the administration section. Discussion which approaches to use for the actual conferencing part is still ongoing * A testing application for AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation, build into Flash Player 11.2) was implemented and is in review http://markmail.org/message/g2zdwuruu7vuizvg * A new clustering of OpenMeetings will be available with the next release of the 2.x tree, we have been discussing some approaches, see http://markmail.org/message/jvkawqwqrpajk2qo and working on the implementation * Plugins are now hosted at apche-extras.org, index of plugins: http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/hosting/search?q=openmeetings * A fast feather track was presented at the ApacheCon EU: https://blogs.apache.org/openmeetings/entry/openmeetings_apachecon_presentation_slide * A vote is open / was successful for Graduation of OpenMeetings from Incubator: http://markmail.org/message/m23h7qaolwuma2dg Signed-off-by: yegor -------------------- Ripple is a browser based mobile phone emulator designed to aid in the development of HTML5 based mobile applications. Ripple entered the Incubator in October 2012. ICLAs contributed and committer accounts created. Currently blocked on submitting code to ASF pending submission and approval of Software Grand Agreement. All code has been compiled internally, zip file created as well as a list of all files that will be contributed under the SGA. Waiting on RIM legal to review and submit SGA as well as contribution of Marks. Signed-off-by: grobmeier, jukka -------------------- S4 S4 (Simple Scalable Streaming System) is a general-purpose, distributed, scalable, partially fault-tolerant, pluggable platform that allows programmers to easily develop applications for processing continuous, unbounded streams of data. S4 entered incubation on September 26th 2011. Primary issues blocking graduation: - growing the community - verifying the name of the project. See PODLINGNAMESEARCH-10 Community development since last report: We had new users showing interest on the s4-user list, which showed regular activity. Several new contributors also participated to technical discussions on the Jira tickets. Project development since last report: The initial release of the completely refactored version of S4 , 0.5.0, was focused on providing the basic API and features. We are now preparing the next release and focusing on integrations, features and performance. Regarding integration, for elasticity, we worked on integrating the Apache incubator Helix project, and for resource scheduling, interfaced with another Apache project: YARN. We also worked on improving performance, which is a key factor for adoption. Signed-off-by: phunt, rvs -------------------- Streams Apache Streams is a lightweight server for ActivityStreams. Streams just entered incubation on November 20 2012, this is our first board report. Mailing lists, SVN and user accounts have been created or are pending request. Website creation and management is underway, using cms.apache.org, but pending some INFRA tasks. Discussion has started on topics like what wiki to use and about ideas for a logo. Next steps: * Get needed services like wiki, issue tracking etc. setup. * Get the Streams website ready for publishing and select a Streams logo. * Get started on importing, verifying and accepting the initial code donation. Signed-off-by: ate, mfranklin, craigmcc, ahart -------------------- Wave Wave is rich, web-based, distributed, collaboration platform that allows users to interact in near real time. The wave platform includes a web-based user interface containing an rich-text. The system is extendable though widgets, robots, and editor doodads. The Wave In a Box implementation is developed in java using a variety of web technologies such as Web Sockets, Java Script, GWT, and supported by an operational transform based conflict resolution algorithm. Wave has been incubating since December of 2010. * Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation. 1. Performing an initial release (currently in progress). We have started the release process, but it has stalled. we were first dealing with the large amount of files with incorrect copyright headers. That has been largely overcome. However we are still struggling with the possible need to obfuscate third party jars with less than compatible licenses. The technical and legal implications of this still need to be addressed. 2. Updating the web site and online documentation. The web site does not have very much useful information on it. Most Information is scattered on the old google-code and waveprotocol.org sites. Prospective users and developers are constantly asking for Where the documentation is. 3. Increasing developer / community contributions. While we are making progress in this area, we need more contributors. We believe that taking care of #1 and #2 will help with this. Building an active community is difficult, but very important. * Issues for the PMC / ASF Board None at this time. * How has the community developed since the last report The community as added two new committers in that last several months (Ali Lown and Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado). Additionally, we have seen an increase in the number of code reviews and mailing list traffic. * How has the project developed since the last report. Several Jira issues have been resolved and a few enhancements have been made. We are making progress towards an initial release. Signed-off-by: Upayavira IPMC comments: rgardler: the confusing note about "obfuscating binaries" in the Wave report was picked up by Benson and taken to the project and IPMC lists. It seems to be cleared up now. It was a matter of weak-copyleft build-time dependencies. It looks like the term "obfuscate" is incorrectly used in this context, but the community is now set to move forwards.