January 2008 Board Report
Status
Summary status, with indication of items needing board attention.
Releases
No releases since the December board report.
Community
No arrivals or departures.
We've made a lot of modifications to the web site to improve navigation and make it easier for users to find the documentation we have on the site and in the Wiki. We still need to add a useful Get Involved page and developer documentation, to lower the bar for new contributors and to spread the knowledge better among the existing committers.
Migration
Since end of December 2007, we no longer depend on Jakarta resources.
Items done:
- moved Subversion content
- updated Subversion and mail references in Maven
- updated Gump metadata
- moved all sections of the web site
- set up redirect from the site at Jakarta
- updated site references in Maven
- moved download area to dist/httpcomponents/
- set up download redirect from dist/jakarta/
- consolidated archive at dist/httpcomponents/
- set up archive redirect from dist/jakarta/
- set up archive redirect from dist/commons/
created DOAPs for HttpCore and HttpClient 4.0
updated DOAP for Commons HttpClient 3.1
- updated external mail archives
- www.nabble.com
- marc.info
Items still pending:
Move of Wiki, see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1442
- Creating the bylaws, we're still operating under Jakarta bylaws
The Wiki is a minor issue and outside of our control. Once we have approved a Charter and Bylaws, we'll consider the migration complete.
Development
We currently use Maven 2 for generating and deploying the main web site and the component specific sites, and Maven 1 for generating and deploying the HttpClient 3.1 site. There are some kinks to the Maven 2 deployment process. We will consider to move to a Subversion based deployment for the main web site. Component specific sites and the 3.1 site are typically only redeployed after releases and include extensive generated content like JavaDocs and cross-referenced sources, these make little sense in Subversion.
The release of HttpCore 4.0 beta1 is imminent. This will be a major milestone, as it marks the beginning of API stability in HttpCore. We've made significant and incompatible improvements to the API after each of the 6 alphas, and have finally reached a point where we are reasonably comfortable with it.
In HttpClient, we could resolve a long-standing deficiency in the interrupt handling of the thread-safe connection manager by using Java 5 features. The decision to upgrade the Java requirement proved really useful here.