VCL has been incubating since December 2008. VCL is a cloud computing platform for the management of physical and virtual machines.
Community Involvement
- The Apache VCL community is growing and people from several organizations are contributing
- Questions about administration and end user use of Apache VCL are being asked and answered on the project's vcl-dev and vcl-user lists
- A growing number of community members from multiple organizations are answering questions
- Collaboration is occurring for architectural design and release planning via the vcl-dev list
- Code patches have been discussed on the vcl-dev list and submitted to the Jira issue tracking system
Release Preparation - Apache VCL 2.1
- The community is working to complete the final administrative tasks required to issue the first release (Apache VCL 2.1)
- Josh Thompson has volunteered to act as the release manager for 2.1 per the advice of Matt Hogstrom, one of the project mentors
- PGP keys have been created and added to the distribution area
- A release candidate artifact has been created and is currently being discussed
- Code and documentation updates are being made to the release candidate per community consensus
- The tasks required to complete the release are being discussed on the vcl-dev list
- Jira is being used to track the release tasks and to assemble the release changelog
- Release procedures are being documented as the community develops its release process
3rd Party Dependencies
- Procedures for handling 3rd party dependencies are being worked out by the VCL community with help from the ASF legal-discuss list
- Major components of VCL are written in Perl and the Apache VCL release will only contain Perl code developed by the ASF
- A Perl interpreter and supplemental Perl modules are required. These are licensed under the Artistic License, GPL, and LGPL.
- Concerns were brought up by the project mentors and a question was posed to the legal-discuss list. The question was answered and we are working on implementing the recommendation.
Project Name
- The Apache VCL project name issue has been resolved
- NCSU has taken steps to clearly indicate on its Apache VCL instance website that Apache VCL is developed by the ASF
- References to NCSU have been removed from the code
- NCSU employees affiliated with the Apache VCL project routinely communicate that VCL is an ASF project and encourage colleagues of other organizations to do the same
Documentation
- A large amount of documentation has been added to the project's Confluence site
- People from multiple organizations have contributed to improving the documentation, both by editing the pages themselves and by pointing out areas for improvement on the lists
Unresolved Issues
- As noted in the May 2009 report -- questions were asked of the mentors regarding the rules governing wiki contributions from individuals who have not signed the CLA. It is the community's understanding that a separate wiki will be needed -- one for official documentation included with releases and one containing contributions from individual who have not signed the CLA. A request has been made to one of the mentors who had offered to create a 2nd wiki instance. This has not been completed yet.
- A request has been made to the mentors to create a Confluence committers group that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
- A request has been made to the mentors to create a Jira Committers role that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
- Some committers have lost administrative access to Jira. The project mentors have been asked to restore the permissions.
Top Issues Before Graduation
- Complete the release of Apache VCL 2.1
- Continue to increase contributors from multiple institutions
Signed off by mentor:
- Alan Cabrera, Kevan Miller