The following is a summary of the off-list discussions and actions on the CAS Viewer that occurred prior to this thread.
Tong Fin developed the CAS viewer as an eclipse plugin in 2006 against the aphaWorks version of UIMA. It was to be part of a suite of plugins (see http://cwiki.apache.org/UIMA/uima-integrated-toolset.html) intended to integrate UIMA SDK tools into eclipse. Although work on the suite stopped in early 2007, the CAS viewer was found to be useful by several internal projects. This year Tong started working on how to enhance debug support for UIMA components (see http://cwiki.apache.org/UIMA/improving-uima-debug-capabilities.html). Given the rich set of features in the CAS viewer and his familiarity with the code, he wanted to utilize this code. On May 6 a binary version of Tong's CAS viewer was forwarded to the subset of committers that work for the same company, for feedback to see if we should work to get internal corporate approval to donate this to Apache. A concern was raised how the CAS viewer relates to the CAS Editor project that is already part of Apache UIMA. Based on this, Tong did a small modification to integrate into the CAS Editor. Several people thought that the Viewer could be interesting to the Apache UIMA project, a useful addition to the CasEditor, and certainly worth a discussion on uima-dev. Following this, we then went through the [long] process of getting our corporate legal approval to donate the code to Apache; part of this involved getting a Software Grant signed and sent to Apache. When this was done, a Jira issue was created and the code attached. However, one of the committers got confused (due to 2 other software grant / donations also being submitted recently). Incorrectly thinking that the discussion had already occurred, he inadvertently checked the code into SVN. At this point it was pointed out on the dev list that we hadn't had a [Vote] on this, so a [Vote] was called for. But what was really the case was that we hadn't even had the public discussion on this. When this was pointed out, the [Vote] was canceled, and work was stopped on bringing this into SVN. Eddie On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 9:17 AM, Marshall Schor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thilo Goetz wrote: >> >> -0 at this time >> >> We had no discussions on this. We have no plans how to merge >> the CAS editor and the CAS viewer. There is quite a lot of >> code there, and it is hardly documented. What are Tong's >> plans with this when it becomes part of Apache UIMA? Will he >> continue developing it? Will he work with Joern on the CAS >> Editor? >> >> Why didn't all of the committers know a software grant >> was in the works? We'll never graduate out of the incubator >> if we don't learn to do things the Apache way. Having mentors >> that are awol most of the time doesn't help either, but we >> really should know better than this by now ourselves. >> >> The only reason I'm not voting -1 is because Joern didn't. >> I hope he has some plan to make this work. > > Good points. I think some of us messed up the process here, so, let's cancel this vote, and start over... > > Part of starting over will be to acknowledge and document some off-list discussions about this and why they started off-list, and summarize these on the dev-list. Another part of this will be to discuss the proposed contribution, how it fits or doesn't with the existing Cas Editor, what might be the possibilities for integration, and, in general, what the way forward might look like, over the longer term. > > Finally, assuming the discussion proceeds to a point where it makes some sense to have a vote, we will re-do a vote. > > -Marshall
