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
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