Cocoon Project Report

[Stefano Mazzocchi]

As requested by the chairman, I send in a report of the activities performed by the Cocoon Project so far.

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The Cocoon Project is slowly starting up.

We are in the progress of establishing the voting rules (taken from Avalon) so that we can start the PMC.

The PMC mail list has not been setup yet. I wanted to have the voting rules resolved in public (means cocoon-dev) before asking instrastructure@ to setup the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mail list.

Our policy will be to reduce traffic on [EMAIL PROTECTED] to only those discussions that *require* privacy. Everything else will be done in public.

The first PMC action will be to resolve the 'recursive bylaws' issue.

The second PMC action will be to establish a policy for the potential use of the Cocoon name on commercial interests or cocoon-related non-ASF web sites.

Infrastructure-wise, we are slowly moving away from our current xml.apache.org location into cocoon.apache.org but we want to plan ahead the movement to reduce user damage (broken links, mail archives and such). Mirroring is also working even if not all links in our docs has been updated (we plan on doing that after the move)

Pier Fumagalli has been voted back as a Cocoon committer (after his renewed intention to work on cocoon and several patches submitted) and is helping us a lot with infrastructure issues directly, reducing the work on infrastructure@ directly.

At the same time, we would like to work with the other new top-level project to synchronize the process of writing such PMC-oriented docs and such. I'm peronally keeping an eye on infrastructure@ community@ and general@incubator for those things and cocoon and avalon are already sharing pieces of PMC-related work.

We are also planning to start using Forrest to build our own documentation, even if this will make it a circular dependency (cocoon depends on forrest and forrest depends on cocoon). But this is something the cocoon documentation team will decide with the forrest developers (most of which are also cocoon developers).

As far as community information, the cocoon communities appear healthy, active and friendly. The high-rate of users becoming committers and committers coming out of emerius status indicates a sane darwinistic environment, well matched by the fact that only individuals or small-sized companies perform most of Cocoon development and maintance, allowing the community to be in total control. Frinction rate and ego-oriented problems are, as usual, close to zero and I see no signs of problems ahead.

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As a special note, I would like to mention how the introduction of the Cocoon wiki (hosted personally by Steven Noels' web site www.cocoondev.org) has been seen by the user community as a great tool and has generated very high-quality and useful documentation. The cocoon wiki was also patched to sends diffs to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mail list (the documentation team), providing ownership and oversight. This is seen as a very useful tool by the documentation team.

This has let us to believe that our current xml-driven documentation system must be improved to match the editing simplicity of a wiki-based solution, but without the unstructured-text problems of wiki content.

My personal vision is that Forrest should be dealing with those issues and Cocoon help them with the technology they need, but that a better documentation editing infrastructure is needed in order to allow a more general audience to help us with that task.

Stefano Mazzocchi - V.P. Apache Cocoon


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