deegree combined PSC & TMC Meeting (2014-07-01)
PSC attendees: HermanAssink, JensFitzke, KlausGreve
TMC attendees: MarkusSchneider, ReijerCopier, StephanReichhelm, TorstenFriebe
Location/Time: Bonn, Germany, Bonn University Center for Remote Sensing / 10:30 - 16:00 h CET
1. Agenda
- Agenda bashing (collection of agenda items and prioritizing them, 5 votes each)
- Technical debt of the deegree initiative (6 votes)
- Future vision and goals (6 votes)
- Website, flyers etc (5 votes)
- Software roadmap (4 votes)
- Moving to hosted services (4 votes)
- Infrastructure server maintenance (3 votes)
- Looking back (3 votes)
- Investment of the companies, funding in general (2 votes)
- Another deegree community space (2 votes)
- Other actions or ideas
- Next meeting
2. Technical debt of the deegree initiative
See Reijer's presentation (attached).
Discussion:
- Main problems are null pointer exceptions (NPE) and errors in workspace initialisation (though, compared to other open source geo projects deegree's quality is comparably good).
- Other aspects are: improve automated testing and increase reusability / customizability
- All participating companies know or experience respective problems to that regard in their software projects. As a result the usage of deegree is increasingly expensive.
- Especially workspace initialisation has to be made more robust as it is deegree's "face" to the user.
- But we need to know the effort which is needed to work on those issues.
Actions:
- Create an overview of the technical debt per component / module: lat/lon and IDgis will create such reports
- Take decision about priorities, top-down from service level to module level: Will be done by everybody in a next meeting (after summer holidays)
- Take action (e.g. initiate a hacking event on that topic)
- By working on the issues, create a guideline document on code quality
- Make community aware of the action
3. Future vision and goals
Markus presents his thoughts on this topic:
- We shall reconsider what deegree shall be (in 5 or 10 years)
- This obviously depends on the user's interests
- Especially in the academic realm deegree is currently poorly used
Discussion:
- Reijer: deegree's strength is that developers can do things with it for which it wasn't designed in the first place
- Markus collect the visions of the meeting participants:
- Jens: More companies (about 10) actively supporting deegree - better presentation to the outside world (including web site, participation in events) - better involvement with the global community (OSGeo)
- Herman: Easier configuration - better interface - increases install base - improve the map rendering quality
- Reijer: Improved software design - have show cases to demonstrate the generic design - make deegree strong as a software framework - improve the visibility
- Stephan: Keep the technology level deegree currently has - keep the integrativeness of deegree as a software framework
- Klaus: Have a sharp profile of deegree (compared to neighbour projects) and make the profile known to improve deegree's usage - improved collaboration with neighbour projects
- Torsten: Be a good citizen in the OSGeo java stack - there shall be a product which brings some money to the initative to cover basic maintenance - have an (public) organisation supporting deegree actively
- Markus: Having found its position in the OSGeo world, being regarded as a good quality software project, being widely used (as a guarantee for sustainability)
- We'd like to repeat that exercise on a regular base.
Actions:
- no specific actions on that topic
Lunch brake
4. Website, flyers etc
- The participants agree that the web site needs maintenance. Also, some sections might need some improvement.
- Most important is having a web site which is at least up to date. This includes a news item and a twitter tweet for each release.
- Other major improvements are user testimonials and a community blog.
Currently the PscMeeting20130913#Web_site_maintenance about web site maintenance are not well known in the community.
- Apart from that, more promotional material shall be in place, especially flyers and videos.
Actions:
- IDgis is willing to work on the web site. Herman asks Arie to make a proposal for improvements.
- There shall be a dynamic news section.
- Everybody shall think about potential new content and community members who could contribute content.
- Project flyers shall be updated
- A 30 seconds video would be nice to have (but is perhaps expensive to achieve)
5. Software roadmap
- Motivation to put this item on the agenda was a request about an ISO 19139 implementation
- The discussion shows that deegree currently cannot have a real roadmap (as its development is basically driven by project requirements). Further more, obviously nobody is interested in a roadmap. At least nobody has asked for it recently.
- Nevertheless kind of a wish list is regarded useful
Actions:
Remove all future release milestones from http://tracker.deegree.org/deegree-services/
- TMC will make release notes available in a wording which is readable by people who are familiar with the major concepts (OGC and the like)
- The ideal case would be that the pull request already provides a text which could be included in the release notes
6. Moving to hosted services
- Nexus: Currently no hosted services are available
- So obviously we cannot get rid of at least one deegree infrastructure server
7. Infrastructure server maintenance
We currently have the following infrastructure components
External hosted services:
- Source code repository (Github, keep)
- Developer wiki (Github, keep)
- Continous Integration (travis-ci.org)
- wald.intevation.org (kick out, move tracker to Github tracker)
- demo.deegree.org (keep, but simplify and keep up to date, move to OSGeo or FOSSGIS infrastructure if possible)
- Mailing list (sourceforge, keep)
Initiative root server:
- Web space: apidoc, schemas, download (Apache, keep)
- Web site (Drupal, keep)
Community wiki (MoinMoin, reconsider)
- Artefact repository (Nexus, keep)
- Issue tracker (trac, move to Github tracker)
Another initiative root server:
- Build server (Jenkins, dedicated server, move to server above and reconsider in general)
Actions:
- Everybody shall have a Github account
- Evaluate if demo could move to OSGeo or FOSSGIS server (Jens)
- Shutdown wald project, make a backup (Torsten)
- Cleanup sourceforge (Jens)
- Move trac to Github (Torsten)
Cleanup MoinMoin wiki, move contents to handbook if appropriate (All)
8. Looking back
... was already covered by other discussions
9. Investment of the companies, funding in general
- 3.4 release needs some effort
- Best solution to this is a code sprint (bring people together)
- Potential location/date: "Berlin Code Sprint" / 7/8 August
- Ask FOSSGIS e.V. for funding of this meeting (Jens)
10. Another deegree community space
... postponed to next meeting
11. Other actions or ideas
- Improve knowledge on deegree usage (download figures, usage figures)
12. Next meeting
Potential date is 23rd September, other options in this same week and the week thereafter.