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Weekly Zope developer meeting
=============================

This is the summary of the weekly Zope developer meeting which happened on
Tuesday, 2010-03-09 on #zope@irc.freenode.org from 3pm to 3:30pm (UTC).

The agenda for this meeting is available in the mailing list archives:
https://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2010-March/039769.html

The IRC logs are located here:
http://zope3.pov.lt/irclogs-zope


Volunteer for automated build/nightly test coordination
=======================================================

We are still looking for a volunteer to coordinate the automated build
efforts. mgedmin wasn't present but in one of his recent blog entries he
expressed that he thinks not being a good fit for that task. We continue
looking for a volunteer. (Update: I was personally contacted by Patrick Gerken
who volunteered. I will follow up on this with him.)


Improving visibility and coverage of (expected) test runs
==========================================================

(Note from writing the summary: The discussion of this topic was hard to put
into a coherent structure for the summary. I guess we need to watch out in the
future to keep discussions during the meeting time a bit more focused on a
single thread of conversation and have explicit agreement when switching
topics. So the following summary is somewhat murky, too.)

- One of the shortcomings in our automated testing infrastructure is that we
  lack a clear and up-to-date view of what tests we should be running and
  verifying whether we do so or not.

- Producing that list isn't directly straight forward. Ensuring that the tests
  of all toolkits are run is a good first step. We need to go further so and
  we need this list to be either manageable very easily or (better?) produced
  automatically by looking at the repository.

- The zope-tests aggregator is already in place and functions well to remind
  the developer about undesirable situations. This could be used for all kinds
  of reminders, not just broken builds, but also missing builds, offline
  buildsbots ... we just have to write some utility code that checks for those
  things. (Think of a Nagios for developers.)

- One action for the automatic build coordinator would be to get all buildbot
  admins to send compatible email to the zope-tests mailing list.


Improving the reliability of making Windows builds available
============================================================

On the topic of having Windows builds available regularly and reliably we
discussed that there is a need to have a list of packages (with
version/platform/python) combinations that require binary eggs so we can
both trigger builds for those packages on the appropriate platforms or have at
least alerts if we miss builds.

Note: people went on a while after the official meeting time discussing the use of
Amazon EC 2 for Windows machines with Visual Studio licenses. The idea arose
that the ZF should be approach about sponsoring this setup (and maybe in turn
get sponsorship by MS for the compiler suite).

Sidnei da Silva volunteered (with Hanno Schlichting helping) to approach this
by producing an AMI which can be run by anyone. He will work on a relaxed
schedule as both Hanno and Sidnei are busy and there are other topics WRT
automated builds and testing that make sense to be completed first. Martijn
already posted a request to the ZF to ponder the financing and contacting MS
for sponsorship which Tres' already picked up.


Post-poned and new issues
=========================

The following agenda items did not make it within the time limit:

- Towards a ZTK release
  - What is needed for a release?
  - Who's the release manager?
  - Can we ensure building Windows binaries?

- Bug tracking/working on bugs regularly

- How do we deal with proposed API changes and Python 3 compatibility?
  (Lennart Regebro)

- Chris McDonough suggests to ponder further structuring of the ZTK into
  separate sub-sets which might allow us to get better mileage regarding
  maintenance and release management. He gave the example of the "Bicycle
  Toolkit" (zope.component, zope.configuration, zope.interface).