Net Meeting 76

Review Status of the Action List

The action item list is maintained as a tracker on SourceForge.

• 75/​3: Migrate NM Action Tracker to Overture Wiki. No progress.
• 75/​2: Assist with LB tracker migration. No progress.
• 75/​1: Speak with SCSK: SCSK will follow the approach taken by Overture for (e.g. the standard library). Action closed.
• 59/​1 : Reconsider SRA input and structure. No progress.
• 41/​1: Video on Deploying VDM. No Progress.

Overture Language Board Status

LB meeting held on December 15: Minutes available at Minutes_of_the_LB_NM%2C_15th_December_2013

The Language Board is currently in between chairs and Peter Jørgensen will take the responsibility of sending out a meeting schedule for 2014 to the Language Board mailing list.

Status of VDMTools Development

VDMTools 9.0.3 release!

http://www.vdmtools.jp/en/modules/news/article.php?storyid=27

Status of the Overture Components

VDMJ

I now believe that all of the fixes and RM changes that had been applied to the old 1.2 series code have been migrated to the 2.0.1 branches. This includes the recent sproadic threads and stop statement changes from the Language Board.

Release Planning

Overture v2.0.2

We presently (21 Jan) have 41 open and 41 closed bugs attached to the v2.0.2 milestone in the GitHub Issues tracker for Overture. This includes all of the migration tasks that Nick and Peter J were working on. That is enough to make a 2.0.2 release as it is, and this will be done soon (per Joey’s time, etc). A release candidate is available at 1, for those interested in testing it. Release notes will be prepared shortly.

Issues in GitHub

Two points, one procedural, one a constraint.

The constraint is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to attach arbitrary files to an issue in GitHub. Joey knows of a few interesting workarounds, but none is really suitable for random users. Unfortunately, this constraint wasn’t apparent when Joey switched the bug reports over. At the moment it’s possible to upload images, and text files can be pasted into the description (or in a supplementary comment).

The procedural comment is that the Milestones in the issue tracker are being used to indicate the version a bug was fixed in, not which version it’s being reported for. This change is to (hopefully!) simplify the process of making release notes, as it is possible to simply look at the closed issues on a milestone and see what was fixed. It means that, when closing out a milestone on a release, there will have to be a mass move of unfixed bugs to the next milestone. Perhaps that will provide some incentive to cut down the number of long-lived bugs :).

Release candidates for minor versions

Going forward, for minor versions, it is Joey’s intent to announce a release candidate to the overture-core list, and if no show-stoppers are found, release that version approximately one week later. The idea is to balance agility in the release cycle with verification; for minor versions it seems that waiting for a consensus that everyone believes the version is good takes far too long.

New buildserver

We have the new buildserver running at 2, and it is producing our test builds now. Not everything is configured, but hopefully the old buildserver will be retired soon (at which point Joey will also get the DNS entries for the old buildserver pointed to the new one).

Community Development

Based on some of the points raised by Joe Kiniry at the 11th Overture workshop there was a discussion about how to form the Overture community and make it grow. The use of social media like Twitter and Facebook was discussed and the impression was that for other tools projects this approach had not been very successful.

At the end of the discussion it was suggested that some of the time for the upcoming Overture workshop should be dedicated for addressing the forming of the Overture community. In particular that some time would be dedicated for presentations from different actors of the community (tool developers, industrial users, students, outsiders etc.) in order to present their view on this and use this as input for a discussion.

It is the responsibility of the workshop organizer to think about how to balance this so there is still room for the technical contributions.

Publications Status and Plans

See Planned Publications for an updated version.

Any Other Business

Nothing for this agenda item.