[TYPO3-v4] Minutes of the 10th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

Xavier Perseguers xavier at typo3.org
Wed Jun 8 13:58:10 CEST 2011 

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

Please find the notes of the 10th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team.

The minutes are also available in the wiki of TYPO3 4.6:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-06-06_-_Minutes_from_the_10th_meeting

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Minutes from the 10th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

The 4.6 release team meets weekly for a Skype discussion round on the 
current activities. If you find this report interesting or have some 
comment or question about a particular topic, don't hesitate to 
follow-up on the thread in the v4 mailing list.

On Monday, June 6th 2011 we held our 10th meeting with the following 
participants:

* Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
* Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
* Steffen Kamper (4.5 Technical Release Manager)
* Benjamin Mack (4.4 Release Manager)
* Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)

Topics
============================

We started our meeting with a general discussion whether we should 
switch to BigBlueButton to hold our weekly meetings. This would allow 
virtually anyone to join us and would yield more transparency than we 
currently have with these minutes.

Ben pointed out that this is the way being used by all big open source 
projects but as we have experienced recently with the Extbase meetings 
and a few others, the stability of our BBB infrastructure is not 
sufficient enough and often requires some "live tuning". Ben suggested 
to discuss that again in a few weeks, once we have a better picture of 
the system.

Olly reminds us that having a public agenda would be good so that people 
know what will be discussed. Ben started such an agenda (on the wiki) 
for our 4.6 meetings and encourages us to write down ideas we have 
during the week, just as he does.

Keeping the spirit of a team alive was our next introduction topic. Ben 
told us that according to his experience, a project team (meaning more 
than a lonely cowboy, with at least 2 members) needs to have a meeting 
about every second week at least to keep the fire burning, even if it 
only lasts for 10 minutes.

If the project is big or has a wide interested audience, it should even 
be public. Extbase is a good example of a regain of enthusiasm after the 
post in the dev mailing list and an opening of its privately-held 
meetings. Good turn for the happiness of all of us!

Form project
----------------------------

[ *TODO* Steffen ] Contact Patrick this week to test the extension.
[ *TODO* Ben ] Contact Patrick about finalizing the manual.

XLIFF
----------------------------

Official TYPO3 Pootle server is ready!

Dominique and Laurent worked a lot to make XLIFF the definitive 
alternative to locallang.xml files used for translations. You may have 
seen that Dominique pushed a few patches to Gerrit yesterday. So please 
review them, we have a lot of potential with this new language handling 
mechanism and we need to ensure the transition to XLIFF files is smooth 
for all of us, TYPO3 Core itself and external extensions too.

* Main patch: [1]
* Converted locallang.xml files: [2]

If you don't know how to contribute, this is a really good opportunity 
to have a look at the Contribution Walkthrough Tutorials [3]

Olly asked whether extracting XLIFF info into locallang.xml files for 
the TER updates of old TYPO3 versions (4.4, 4.3) will be done or not. 
Dominique told me he already wrote scripts to perform this operation as 
he is aware that once people start using Pootle to translate TYPO3 they 
won't agree to go back to the old (current) translation mechanism.

Toolbar in ExtJS
----------------------------

Steffen just converted the cache clearing and other standard widgets 
from the toolbar and wrote an initial patch which removes prototype and 
switches to ExtJS.

We will try to integrate the initial work into alpha2. What is not yet 
integrated is the help icon and the info module.

[ *TODO* ] Define a new API to add other widgets to the toolbar

TCEforms refactoring
----------------------------

Benni reminded us we wanted to integrate first of two parts of this big 
refactoring work.

[ *TODO* Benni ] Contact Andreas to really get things integrated before 
feature freeze.

Install Tool
----------------------------

Benni told us that refactoring was still going on and that he wants to 
ensure all the "basis" is safe, security-wise too, before building up 
and adding further features.

[ *TODO* Steffen ] Steffen thought about some bug he found and will 
report it and assign it to Benni.

FAL
----------------------------

Discussions are going to take place this week with main actors (DAM 
project too).

Olly told us that he had a meeting and they discussed how FAL should be 
put on top of DAM, which features should be put into which area and so 
on. He pointed out one major pitfall with current implementation. 
Current concept of FAL is based on "folders" holding files. However when 
it comes to Flickr for instance there is no concept of "folders" and as 
we ultimately want FAL to be a good abstraction layer for virtually any 
storage, we should rethink the concept and make FAL a bit less strict.

Steffen told us he would like to separate the refactoring of the file 
module from the FAL project itself, to make it less overwhelming. We 
agreed that it should be the responsibility of another team working in 
parallel to the FAL project to make sure FAL is "usable" while still 
lowering the job of the FAL team itself.

File Upload
----------------------------

Internal discussions are going on, we should get some clearer picture of 
the situation during this week I guess.

BE performance
----------------------------

Steffen told us he discussed our architecture with the Sencha guys but 
they could not really help him because of our use of iframes. Steffen is 
convinced we should try the card layout which was proposed by Kay 
because the basic performance problem is really the huge amount of JS 
files being loaded again and again to be accessible in every frame.

We want to start with the About module and then move on with other modules.

[ *TODO* Steffen ] Contact Kay and ask him to do the first steps with 
card layout as he had first this idea and already made some PoC.

Introduction Package
----------------------------

Olly will dig into it and get used to it, to help current team.

Working with Git and Gerrit
----------------------------

As you remember, Ben suggested to create some video tutorials for Git, 
Gerrit and generally TYPO3. Basically we need a "screencast team" and we 
already created a project on Forge: [4]. Feel free to join the move if 
you think this is the way you would like to contribute to TYPO3, because 
"coding" is not the sole skill we need from the community, as you know.

Basic idea would be to let anybody send screencast to the team and get 
back an official intro and closing added.

Dates
============================

* TYPO3 4.6 alpha2 on June 14th 2011, *this is next week!*
* Feature Freeze and TYPO3 4.6 beta1 on August 2nd 2011
   no new features and no exceptions after the feature freeze date
* Final Release of TYPO3 4.6.0 on October 25th 2011

Next steps
============================

If you feel interested in a particular project or task, please reply on 
the list or directly get in contact with Xavier Perseguers as Release 
Manager of TYPO3 4.6.

[1] https://review.typo3.org/#change,2572
[2] https://review.typo3.org/#change,2573
[3] http://wiki.typo3.org/Contribution_Walkthrough_Tutorials
[4] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3-screencast

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Cheers
Xavier

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
Release Manager TYPO3 4.6

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: http://typo3.org

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