Foswiki update May 2014

Hello Foswiki community, Time for an overdue update of the Foswiki project.   Read on for notes on the Foswiki Association meetings, the upcoming Foswiki 1.2 release,  Foswiki Translations,  the Foswiki Task Teams, and the Foswiki infrastructure and GitHub migration.

Foswiki Association

The Foswiki association held its Fifth General Assembly on .17th May 2014.   Oliver Krueger and Crawford Currie have stepped down from the board.  George Clark was reelected as a board member. Lynnwood Brown and  Julian Levens were elected into the board. All three accepted their election. The "new" board consists of: Paul Harvey, Michael Daum, Lynnwood Brown, Julian Levens and George Clark. The Board of Directors met on 23rd May 2014.  Lynnwood Brown was elected as Chairman, and Julian Levens  as treasurer. The complete minutes of both meetings can be found at: FifthGeneralAssemblyMinutes and AssociationBoardMinutes20140523

Release 1.2

We are beginning the release process for Foswiki 1.2 and wanted to pass along the news. George Clark agreed to serve as the Release Manager for Foswiki 1.2. There has been a lot of excellent work done on Foswiki 1.2, and it's time to get it out.   See Development.ReleasePlan for details of what's in the release. We will be starting regular release meetings to drive forward the release process.   We are still in the early stages of picking a schedule for the meetings.  Given the time zones involved it appears that a weekday around 1200Z seems to be mostly waking hours for many of our developers.  Release meetings will be held in the #foswiki channel on IRC,  and we'll start off with bi-weekly meetings. Meetings will be limited to 1 hour if possible. Check out your timezones. If you have any opinions regarding the proposed schedule, please speak up!   Everyone is welcome to participate in the release process.  Planned agenda for the meetings:

• Release blocker review
• Other task review
• Testing and usability feedback
• Feature request review (limited … we are in feature freeze)

In the meantime if you have a favorite task that has not seen much activity, please mark it urgent so it bubbles up to the top of the development effort.

Translations

We've established a new email list for the translators:  foswiki-translations@lists.sourceforge.net. We will use this new email list to keep the translators up to date with the efforts.   You can subscribe here:  https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/foswiki-translations.  Please pass along this information to anyone else in your organizations who might be willing to help in keeping Foswiki translations current.

Task Teams

In the annual meeting, the Foswiki Association decided to retire several of our Task Teams.  The Translation team is being split into the Infrastructure and Release task teams.   Translation is integral to each new Foswiki release.   You can see the current and past team information here:  http://foswiki.org/Community/TaskTeam.If you can help with any of the teams, please let us know.

Foswiki Infrastructure

And last but not least, we have some critical decisions to make regarding the Foswiki infrastructure:

• The infrastructure team is working on migrating from subversion to github as our primary repository.   We've been running github in parallel with svn for several years now and we hope to complete the migration to git prior to the branching of Foswiki 1.2 from trunk.
  • We are proposing making github the primary Foswiki repository under the "Foswiki" github account:
    • The current flow   svn → (git-svn repo) → github would be reversed.
    • Core + Default extensions would be in one github repository under the Foswiki account.
    • Each non-default extension will be in it's own github repository under the Foswiki account
    • Users will also be able to release extensions from their own github accounts.
  • The Tasks web would still be used as our tracker for extensions in the Foswiki github account.
    • It is yet to be determined if we will make any effort to support extensions released from other non-Foswiki github accounts using the Tasks web, vs. using the github tracker.
  • We will still maintain a foswiki-owned repository but it will be a mirror of the github environment.
  • We are still working on a way to map the historical svn rev numbers into git commit identifiers.   Because of differences in how git and svn record a change, it's possible for one svn checkin to result in multiple git commits,  so it's not a 1:1 relationship.
  • We also need to work out a good mechanism for updating the tasks web with each github commit.
• The Pootle server (http://translate.foswiki.org/) is down due to an issue encountered during a system upgrade, and we are taking this opportunity to review tools and decide if there might be a better alternative.
  • Pootle integration to scm tools like subversion or git has been difficult, and only translates one branch.
  • Weblate (http://weblate.org/) appears to be similar to Pootle, but has very tight github integration,  and can translate across multiple branches.
  • Other suggestions are welcome.
  • If anyone here has experience with Weblate and git integration, we need assistance in working though the integration requirements and implementation.

As you can see,  there is much to be done.  Please help if you can! Thanks, George Clark On behalf of the Foswiki Association Board.