BIRT PMC Minutes - Monday, February 11, 2008

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Meeting

Monday, February 11, 2008 @ 10am Pacific.

Attendees

• Wenfeng Li - BIRT PMC Lead - Actuate Corporation
• Paul Clenahan - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation
• Jason Weathersby - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation
• Scott Rosenbaum - BIRT PMC - Innovent Solutions
• Mike Fox - BIRT PMC - IBM Corporation

For this meeting, we were joined by:

• IBM Bi-Directional Development Team:
  • Alex Benish
  • Lina Kemmel
  • Tarek Abou Aly

• Other IBM
  • Cheng-Yee Lin

Bi-Directional Support (BiDi)

The IBM Bi-Directional (BiDi) development team joined this PMC call. The team updated us on a contribution that have been working on for the BIRT project that enables BIRT to be used to create BiDi (Right to Left) reports and output. The project scope that they have been working in is intended to address both the design time needs of Bidi-enabled report creation as well as the runtime Bidi requirements of report generation:

• Report Developers. The BIRT Report Designer will be able to use enabled for Bidi throughout the entire cycle of report creation - including defining data sets, report content and report layout.
• End users. End users will be presented with correctly laid out and easy readable Bidi documents.

The BIRT PMC is very excited about this contribution to the project and the fact that the BiDi team want to work towards Committer status for ongoing BiDi support within BIRT.

We discussed the logistics for contributing the approximately 7.5K lines of code changes to the project. As with other contributions to Eclipse, we will follow the standard process of managing the contribution via Bugzilla. The BIRT Project will assign existing Committer(s) to work with the original developers to review the code and contribute it to the project, over time working towards the new developers reaching Committer status.

Ideally we would like to see this contribution make it into the BIRT 2.3 release, specifically the M6 milestone. However, that is a pretty tight timeline and it is not clear yet if that will be feasible. The IBM team are going to look at the dates to see if this would work. If this is feasible, we will treat BiDi support as a feature project with the 2.3 release and update the Development Plan accordingly.

Next action is for the BiDi team to come back to us with a date for the initial contribution via Bugzilla.

BIRT 2.2.2 Development

The TPTP team have indentified a potential regression in 2.2.2 that needs research. At this stage it is not known if this is bug or not. It's being investigated.

BIRT 2.2.2 RC1 was made available for download on Friday, Feb 1, 2008. Aside from the open issue mentioned above, we are not anticipating any other code changes between the current build and the final release on February 29, 2008. We encourage you to test this RC and let us know (via Bugzilla) if there are any issues.

General Information

BIRT 2.2.2 is the second maintenance release in the BIRT 2.2 release series. The 2.2.2 release is focused on addressing critical bugs identified by the community. BIRT 2.2.2 is part of the Europa Coordinated Maintenance Release.

The Development Plan for BIRT 2.2.2 is available on the Eclipse BIRT Project Development Plan pages.

For a list of bugs assigned to the release, refer to Bugzilla: BIRT 2.2.2 Assigned Bugs in Bugzilla

BIRT 2.3 Development

No issues to report. As reported last week, BIRT 2.3 M5 continues to be targeted for Feb 18 (with Feb 26 Public Access). The M5 release is the first of the BIRT 2.3 Milestones that will have new features visible for testing -- see Bugzilla for the detailed list. A New & Notable will be posted for this release when the release is available.

General Information

BIRT 2.3 is the next major release of BIRT and part of the Ganymede Simultaneous Release. BIRT 2.3 is scheduled to be release in June 2008.

The Development Plan for BIRT 2.3 is available on the Eclipse BIRT Project Development Plan pages.

For a list of bugs assigned to the release, refer to Bugzilla: BIRT 2.3 Assigned Bugs in Bugzilla.

Events

EclipseCon 2008 on March 17-20, 2008 - Santa Clara, California - 10 Sessions on BIRT!

Articles

Full list of major articles can be found on the Wiki page for BIRT Project Articles.

Other articles, tips and techniques, demos and other resoures can be found on the BIRT Exchange community site.