[Project-managers] BSP 2009 and changes to project management procedures

[John J Forrest]

Ted,

On thinking it over, I can see problems with trunk projects pointing to
releases.  The main problem would be Osi.

Suppose I make an improvement to Clp which I want to be available in Cbc.
I can make a release of Clp if I want to, but there may have to be changes
to OsiClp.  This would mean a new release of Osi which might not be
convenient as Osi has so many solvers.

Does anyone else see this as a problem?  I suppose I could keep a trunk and
a branch?

John


                                                                                             
  From:       Ted Ralphs <ted at lehigh.edu>                                                    
                                                                                             
  To:         project-managers <project-managers at list.coin-or.org>                           
                                                                                             
  Date:       06/30/2009 05:38 PM                                                            
                                                                                             
  Subject:    [Project-managers] BSP 2009 and changes to project management     procedures   
                                                                                             





Hi folks,

This e-mail is to (1) announce the 2009 Bug Squashing Party and (2) make
you aware of important impending changes in the TLC's recommended project
management procedures. I apologize for the lengthy explanation, but there
is a lot to tell!

1. The third annual Bug Squashing Party is scheduled to take place July
7-8. For those who are not familiar with this event, it is an annual
on-line event in which volunteers gather in a virtual chat room to fix as
many small bugs, compiler warnings, portability issues, memory leaks, etc.
as possible in COIN projects. By gathering volunteers with access to a wide
range of platforms and compilers, we have been able in the past to
accomplish a lot in a short period of time. The procedure involves creating
a temporary copy of the most recent stable branch of various projects,
fixing the bugs in that copy and then merging the changes (at the PMs
discretion) back into the stable branch and/or trunk, as appropriate. More
information is available at the Bug Squashing Party wiki.

PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU

-- WANT TO HELP WITH THE EVENT YOURSELF
-- DO OR DO *NOT* WANT BUGS TO BE FIXED IN YOUR PROJECT

By default, all projects using the BuildTools will be included.

2. As part of a multi-faceted, long-term effort to improve the usability of
all COIN projects and ease the overall maintenance burden, we will be
announcing over the next several months a number of changes to the
recommended project management procedures for COIN projects. The first of
these will be a recommendation to begin developing project trunks against
release versions of other projects. There are many reasons for this and we
will be providing a full explanation in the near future. In short, however,
we would like to decouple development of independent COIN projects as much
as possible in order to (1) reduce the impact of individual projects'
release cycles on other projects, (2) ease the complexity of dependencies
and make simultaneously installation of multiple projects easier on end
users and (3) ultimately make it possible to support the development of a
package management system that would enable easy installation and upgrade
of COIN binary packages over time. At the moment, our procedures tend to
couple the development of many of the projects and actually make the
release cycle much slower. Our current handling of dependencies is also not
very compatible with the maintenance RPMs for COIN, etc. You will here more
about this over time.

PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU

-- WOULD LIKE US TO SWITCH THE EXTERNALS OF YOUR PROJECT'S TRUNK TO POINT
TO RELEASES OF DEPENDENT PROJECTS AND TEST IT DURING THE BSP.
-- PLAN ON DOING THIS YOURSELF.

Of course, this is a completely voluntary step, but we are strongly
encouraging it. Please let me know if you have any questions about any of
this. Thanks for your support!

Cheers,

Ted
--
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted

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