October 16, 2008

Attendees: tef, Tom, Elaine, Greg, Eric, Scooter, Conrad

New Action Items

• Conrad, Eric, Greg and Scooter have tasks for Chimera production release and conversion to svn/trac (see item 2 below)
• Everyone will look at the trac interface to check for missing functionality and bugs (item 3)
• Scooter will follow up with Marcus regarding Chimera library course (item 4)

Action Items from previous meetings

• Al will look into configurations for test machines and Greg's machine
• Al will decommission SGI after the next Chimera production release
• Al will install stereo-capable workstation to replace SGI before decommissioning SGIs
• tef will contact Adobe for more information about embedding 3d graphics in PDF documents

Minutes

0. Test lab machine configurations (Al)
   • Al reported via e-mail that the configurations for the low-end machines will have dual-core (2.2/2.4 GHz) CPUs, 2GB memory, 500GB disk, and the graphics card one step up from on-board graphics. The medium-range machines will have quad-core CPUs, 2GB memory, 500GB disk, with graphics cards in the $300 price range. All systems will be ordered with Windows XP because that's the easiest (only?) way to get XP nowadays. The machines will be ordered in the next week or two.
   • The systems will be installed in the renamed Test Lab in the two corners, with two machines in each corner. Peripherals will be connected via 2-port KVMs so that it's easy to switch between systems. The system disks will be partitioned for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and several flavors of Linux. Only XP, Vista and (probably) Fedora will be actively updated. Other Linux flavors will have disk partitions allocated, but will need to be (re)installed from scratch when a test system is needed. All OS installation/update will be handled by Al.
1. Previous Action Items
   • All previous action items were covered under other agenda items.
2. OpenGL panel (Greg)
   • Greg demonstrated the implementation of the OpenGL panel and everyone agreed that it is satisfactory. The only changes required is that the yes/no dialogs that are displayed at the end of a session should have default "No" answers rather than "Yes".
   • With the completion of the OpenGL panel, we are ready for the next production release for Chimera, which will include the fixes for on-board graphics card on Windows. The list of tasks are:
     • fork tree and label branch as 1.3 and trunk as 1.4 (Conrad, 10/20)
     • fix build process to use trunk for daily builds and 1.3 for release candidate (Conrad, Greg)
     • fix version handling code (automated version number becomes "build" number instead of release number) (Greg)
     • fix version checking code under Help menu (Greg, Eric)
     • build and announce release candidate (Team, target 10/27)
     • warn developer (Wei) about upcoming svn convertion (Eric)
     • create account for Wei to access svn/trac (Scooter, Eric)
     • convert from cvs to svn (Team, Scooter, target 11/3)
     • convert from gnats to trac (Team, Scooter, target 11/10)
3. Conversion from gnats to Trac (Scooter)
   • Scooter has reimported all gnats reports into trac. "internal-fix" state is now converted as "closed". Discarding "internal-fix" state means that bug submitters will not receive notification that their bugs are fixed in a production release; this was deemed acceptable by everyone. Release notes may be generated by querying against milestones or dates instead of "internal-fix" state. Everyone should use trac to identify missing functionality or bugs.
4. Chimera library course (Scooter)
   • Gilberto is leaving the library and his replacement, Marcus, is apparently not up-to-speed regarding the Chimera course. Scooter will follow up with both Gilberto and Marcus to resolve the issues.
5. Public access to Chimera source repository (Tom)
   • With conversion to trac/svn, we will have access to a very nice web interface for viewing Chimera sources. It would be nice to be able to point users/developers to new or updated source code. Currently, we require downloaders of Chimera source code to agree to license agreement. Tom felt that requiring users to obtain a trac account just to view simple changes is a high barrier. Scooter pointed out that Cytoscape does not require license agreements for browsing the source; however, each source file contains a copy of the copyright/license. Further discussion is required to decide on the best approach.

Meeting ended at 4pm. Item below was not discussed.

6. Evaluation of features to remove or improve (All)