February 2007 Board Report
General information
(As our esteemed chair Henning Schmiedehausen is on vacation this month, this quarter's report is being prepared by Will Glass-Husain).
The Velocity project is inches away from the eagerly anticipated release of Velocity 1.5, the first major release of our engine in almost three years. December and January saw a flurry of activity in cleaning up last minute bugs, updating documentation, and preparing the release.
We have had passionate recent discussion on the dev and private list about release procedure. In part, this is due to the anticipated visibility of the Velocity 1.5 release and in part due to the relatively young nature of the Velocity TLP / PMC as we establish correct release practice.
For recent beta / rc releases we have had a "vote-then-build" process in which a PMC member announces they are ready to release, a vote is held, then the release is shipped. In mid-January such a vote was announced for Velocity 1.5. Midway through the vote one of the PMC members expressed concern that there were no binaries to examine. A consensus opinion urged a switch to a "build-then-vote" procedure and the current vote was tabled. A few days later, a second vote was held to release Velocity 1.5 with +1's from almost all parties except for a last-minute -1 (from a different PMC member). The concerns driving the -1 vote were not serious (minor documentation / site issues), but the -1 voter felt strongly that these issues should be addressed before release. (Being a release vote, the -1 was not binding but our release manager agreed to table the release in light of the concerns).
A frustrating aspect of this process was that these issues could not be directly fixed, but needed to wait for the vote to conclude, then a rebuild of the distro then a new vote. The departure of our chair (who had been driving the release) on a month-long vacation has temporarily paused this process. Will Glass-Husain has offered to push the release through to conclusion in the meantime but personal committments have led to a several week delay.
In related news, we have prepared a press release for distribution regarding the Velocity 1.5. Due to the wide-spread use of this library in the Java community we anticipate getting plenty of attention when the release occurs. The release was shared with the PRC committee list (which was somewhat unresponsive) but suggestions for improvements were received from several members.
The Velocity project has no board-level issues at this time.
Community changes
No new committers were voted in since the last board report. No new PMC members were voted in since the last board report.
Velocity Engine project
As noted above, the entire Velocity community is eagerly awaiting the momentary release of Velocity 1.5. We fully expect this release to conclude as previously predicted during Q1.
Velocity Tools project
Velocity Tools 1.3 was released on February 8. Work on the next 1.x version has already begun.
Velocity DVSL project
There were no changes in the DVSL code base. No DVSL development happened in the last month.