A useful discussion was had at ApacheCon today; here are my notes: Present - Nick Burch, Dominik Stadler, David North. Shane Curcuru (ASF director) was around and chipped in some useful suggestions.
Some discussion of making it easier to run the tests in-Eclipse; people keep tripping over the "POI.testdata.path must be set" error. Dominik has a patch for this which tries to find test-data in the cwd - which Just Works out of Eclipse. ACTION: Dominik commit the patch. Some discussion of knowing which tests to run before committing; difficult to just run them out of Eclipse as the build process has some hard-coded data about expected failures. David also mentioned it's difficult to tell which ant target(s) to run to replicate the Jenkins build. ACTION: David to sort out descriptions in build.xml so ant -p gives useful and complete information. Nick suggested David should manage a 3.14 beta1 release, as an exercise to prove the release process is fully documented. ACTION: David to arrange this. Some discussion of where our code lives: are we happy with SVN or should we migrate to Git? Nick - enough bridging and mirroring mechanisms that working in Git with the current setup and pushing back to SVN should be fine. Dominik: some concern that differences in IDs make it impossible to clone from e.g. the Github mirror and them push back direct to SVN. Nick - we should talk to infra team, they may have a solution to this. ACTION: Dominik talk to infra about how to work best with SVN via Git. Some discussion of time it takes to run the tests. Timed "ant test" (note: avoids integration tests) on David's laptop (i7 with an SSD) at 1 minute 17 seconds, which is good enough for now. TestSignatureInfo appears to fail without internet access. ACTION: David find out why and fix it. Discussed whether to switch the build to Gradle from Ant. It's the way the rest of the world is going, but no immediate rush. Removing some knowledge/logic from the build first would be good. All agreed Maven is too heavy/not suitable for POI. Discussion of desirable new features. David: wanting to round out FormulaParser support in XSSF. In particular, cross-workbook references in formulae. Nick: it's 90% there. A bunch of tests in HSSF can be promoted to joint tests if it's completed in XSSF. ACTION: David to try and finish this. Noted there is some complexity to be discussed, e.g. what text does getFormula give back, is it what's stored, what the user sees in Excel - these will differ for cross-wb formulas. Discussed what version of Java we should require. Current 1.6 is likely to be where we stay for a while: end-users tend to be very conservative. Discussed https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58466 ACTION David: try swapping his impl for the speed-up, original was a community patch so may not be perfect Nick proposed we should have an ooxml-schemas-1.2 JAR containing visio, security & main, rather than three separate artefacts. But keep the existing lightweight one too. All agreed this made sense. ACTION: Someone to implement this. Nick: How should we address nobody reading the website. e.g s/overflow and mailing list users never read the FAQ. No immediate ideas. ACTION: all think about it. ACTION David - check out the StackOverflow tag for POI Nick: CSS for JavaDocs might deserve a tweak when the new Apache logo & its font guidelines are out - coming soon. Discussed website and use of ancient version of Apache Forrest, now discontinued. Not a major issue as just committers work on it. ACTION: David read up on the Apache CMS and how other projects do websites, but no change in POI for now. David: are we happy with bugzilla? General consensus: Yes. JIRA is painful for sysadmins and none of those present had a good word to say about it. Dominik: Private tags are handy to organise bugs. Nick: I can create public keywords if requested. Javen O'Neal - decent number of patches coming in, we should offer to mentor him to become a committer, any volunteers? Nick: I have a half-written e-mail suggesting it. David: happy to do the mentoring as the most recent addition to the team. ACTION: Nick send e-mail, David follow up if Javen is interested. Discussed web of trust - David: if I am to do a release, do I need to sign it with my PGP key? Nick: yes, are you in the Apache web of trust? ACTION: David pass keyslip to Nick so Nick can sign David's PGP key. ACTION: all to trawl the website for out-of-date content. ACTION: David to focus on formula docs + compatibility matrix images alongside his work in this area. -- David North, Technical Lead, CoreFiling Limited http://www.corefiling.com Phone: +44-1865-203192 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
