Apps Team Meeting November 9th, 2006

Agenda

• Question du Jour : (5 min) Is alpha4 dragging on an issue for you?
• Alpha4 status : (10 min) Still no RC... We keep bumping into blocking bugs every single day. It's true that moving to osaf.us revealed new bugs but not because of Cosmo 0.5, rather because of stress testing unsuscribe/subscribe and unpublish/share scenarios. As far as I can tell, very few of those bugs affected Apps team members but still... I sent an email to the dev list yesterday giving an "Road ahead" overview of how we'll move to a final 0.7alpha4 RC. Comments, feeling on the status of alpha4?
• Alpha5 : (10 min) We're moving squarely in. Discussing with Katie and Sheila, alpha5 will also be a "feature driven" milestone with dogfoodable dashboard and sharing ecosystem. This last piece should sync up with Cosmo 0.6. The previous piece is quite large right now looking at the SWAG so it's likely that alpha5 will end after the new year rather than before (contradicting what I said last week). Comments, questions?
• Issues and Announcements : (5 min) Have something to announce? Please take the stage.

Summary

• Progress
  • 0.7alpha4 : testing against osaf.us, few blockers left, should land next week
  • All Apps team devs on 0.7alpha5
• Plan
  • 0.7alpha4 : build that RC...
  • 0.7alpha5 : SWAG the recently added bugs and triage what's not required out of the milestone

Minutes

Question du Jour : Is alpha4 dragging on an issue for you?

• No, most alpha4 bugs are on-going issues on sharing
• No one blocked or even feeling productivity dragged because of this

Alpha4 status

• Good thing we spent time now (rather than at the end) stabilizing the code

Alpha5

• John: the only way to get Preview is to punt a bunch of things out
• Bryan: make sure we don't add anything to the pile...
• John: We need to account for performance improvments, allocate more time to it
• Brian: email plan is in good shape
• Reid: we have to drop some features
• Bryan: concerned about the update workflow
• Risks:
  • Update workflow: lots of the details are not really well sorted out, we may have surprises when implementing (haven't started yet)
  • Performance: very hard to SWAG and really important to nail
  • Printing: hard to cut, lots of work...
  • Search: we haven't really used / dogfooded that, worry about the bugs surfacing late in the game

Issues and Announcements

• Bryan to move to Portland by the end of the year
• Following on John's proposal, we'll be trying to switch to Skype using a new Polycom mike/speaker. Philippe working with Dave on that.

Status

Brian

• Added offline support mail service and a new --offline startup option for Bug#6553
• Working on In / Out collection redesign Bug#6857
• Prioritized Preview tasks in Bugzilla and added comments and design decisions

Bryan

• Met with Jeffrey and Grant to talk about dashboard/recurrence/update issues
• Set up 'compare' indexes to meet spec requirements for the remaining dashboard columns; finishing the calendar column will wait for domain work on underlying attributes, which Grant will work on after the bug 6700 work.
• Redoing the Date column as a compare index.
• Planning PTO between Christmas and New Year's, to move to Portland.

Jeffrey

• Met with Bryan and Grant to talk about upcoming dashboard/recurrence/update work
• Fixed Bug#7308 and Bug#7251, don't use a freebusy subcollection, use a Cosmo property
• Started work on recurrence in the dashboard, JeffreyHarris20061109

John

• Worked on performance (Bug#4453: summary table scrolling is too slow). The good news is that the old problem where scrolling got slower as the table got larger is fixed in wxGrid. Robin's wxPython demo demonstrates that scrolling a grid can be blindingly fast event when written in Python. Unfortunately, Chandler seems many orders of magnitude slower than Robin's python demo. The reason is because data lookup in Chandler is still way too slow, even using an index. I can optimize line scrolling quite a bit and we can improve the way sections map rows to indexes, but in the end we're probably going to need to make index access way faster. Also, I noticed that creating indexes on the collections we have in the sidebar is amazingly slow, i.e. 100 items/sec.
• While looking into Bug#4453, I added fixed size columns to wxGrid, (Bug#5724: wxGrid should have non-resizable columns). It won't be checked in until after Robin's wxWidgets merge later this week.
• Worked on Bug#6732: Intermittent crash during functional tests. The functional tests ran all last week -- except when they occasionally hung. I didn't see a single crash. I'll continue running them, but I suspect that the crash will not happen on my machine.
• Fixed Bug#7281: assertion error on quitting in alpha4 branch and trunk
• Checked in fixed for Bug#6929: Minimze copying blocks to the user data. This should improve performance by copying fewer blocks during startup from a fresh repository.

Philippe

• Mostly on alpha4 duties: daily Bug Council and triage, test logging and bug tracking, etc...
• Reviewed all 0.7Release bugs for the Apps team and reassigned to alpha5 and alpha6
• Made a first count of the SWAG for alpha5
• Worked on 2007 Budget with Erin, Ted and others

Reid

• spent too much time getting my home setup working well again
• triaged my new alpha 5 bugs (Bug#7332, Bug#7340, Bug#7328, Bug#7331, Bug#7292)
• fixed bug 7331 (Add hint text to addressing fields)
• fixed bug 7292 (Text widgets should all have localizable sampleText attributes)
• Found out that the +5 indicator for mail addresses should not be a separate block, but rather coloured text appended to the end of the address list
  • I think this is a better design actually
  • simplifies detail view changes for indicator support (Bug#7048)

Robin

• Ran into problems when trying to update OSAF's wx to the current wxWidgets CVS. Worked on the problems, and also reported some to Stefan, and we got fixes in place for the 2.7.2.0 release.
• Now working on updating OSAF's wx to the 2.7.2.0 release. The functional tests are passing on Windows and OSX. I'm now working on tracking down the cause of a functional test failure on Linux.
• Reviewed patches from Heikki and John.
• Fixed a number of bugs pointed out by the community, and applied patches from the tracker.
• Added theQuickTime backend for wxMediaCtrl on Windows. (Resurrected it from old unused code into a new module.)
• Released wxPython 2.7.2.0.
• Various community support activities via email and IRC.

-- PhilippeBossut - 09 Nov 2006