Meeting minutes 2000-01-11

Topic:     ICU Development Team Meeting
Date:      2000-01-11
Time:      9:00AM - 10:00AM PST
Place:     IBM Corp.
Host:      Markus Scherer (schererm@us.ibm.com), IBM Corp.


Attendees:
  Bob Verbrugge (Compuware)                bobv@nl.compuware.com
  David Craig (NCR)                        david.craig@ncr.com
  Jesper Larsen (Compuware)                Jesper_Larsen@nl.compuware.com
  Helena Shih (IBM)                        hshih@us.ibm.com
  Markus Scherer (IBM)                     schererm@us.ibm.com
  Steve Watt (Progress)                    swatt@progress.com
  Steven Loomis (IBM)                      srl@monkey.sbay.org
  Tex Texin (Progress)                     texin@progress.com
  Vladimir Weinstein (IBM)                 vweinste@us.ibm.com

Minutes Taker:
  Markus Scherer

Current PMC members are:

    Mark Davis    [alternate: TBD]
    Hideki Hiura  [alternate: TBD]
    Helena Shih   [alternate: Markus Scherer]
    Tex Texin     [alternate: Steve Watt]
    Bob Verbrugge [alternate: Jesper Larsen]
    Laura Werner  [alternate: TBD]

#Agenda for today's meeting#

- Action item review from the previous meetings
- Release Schedule
- Changes to Stable API
- Action items from this meeting
- Future meeting schedule

#Action item review from the previous meetings#
      [r] : removed
      [-] : completed
      [ ] : open

Completed (remove from this list before inviting for the next meeting):

[r] T19990830-02 [Tom and Alan]   Contact each other regarding transliteration framework issues.
    ->  transliteration implementation well under way
[-] T19991025-06 [All]            All the ICU development team members should subscribe to the ICU mailing lists.
    ->  everyone should be on by now,
        or have been reminded today
[-] T19991025-07 [All]            Send prioritization comments to Helena.
    ->  see http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/develop/tasks.html
[-] T19991221-01 [Helena]         Resend Bob's proposal for OS abstraction layer.
    ->  done; Bob will check if he has time to work on this
[r] T19991108-04 [PMC members]    Find an alternate for each member of the PMC.
    ->  taken offline
[-] T19991108-06 [All]            Examine the API change process and submit change suggestions to Helena.
    ->  the initial process is accepted;
        it will be continually reviewed as we go along
[r] T19991209-01 [Helena]         Go over the current APIs and figure out which ones needs to enabled for UTF-8 processing.
    ->  UTF-16 support for now,
        UTF-8 (& UTF-32) discussion will be restarted after that

Pending:

[ ] T19991108-02 [Laura]          Finalize the name issue with IBM marketing.
    ->  Discussed keeping the abbreviation "ICU" because
        it is a known and established name, and a change would
        cause a lot of work on code, documentation, and the web server pages.
        The long name could be dropped, or changed to, e.g.,
        "International Classes for Unicode";
        only "Classes" was debated - suggestions were
        "Code", "Collection", and others.
        Legally, all unique names are taken.
        The more generic names do not seem to improve much on the current one
        after a change as discussed before.
        The similarity with "Intensive Care Unit" was no concern today.
[ ] T19991123-01 [Helena]         Go over the current APIs and mark draft and stable.
    ->  Bob et al. to review the list.
[ ] T19991123-03 [PMC members]    ICU testing issues.
    ->  especially Progress: collation testing etc.?

#Release Schedule#

Next release: 2000jan, driven by IBM XML team.
Then: 2000jun/jul, including work currently in progress.
After that, how do we decide on a release schedule?
Discussion about what we call
- releases that we formally support
  -> "reference release", "fcs release"
- releases that contain new features but are not fully tested
  and supported
  -> "enhancement release", "sdk release", "preview release"

#Changes to Stable API#

How do we prevent APIs that are marked @stable from being changed
by a contributor?
->We don't have the means to really prevent it, since our process
is review-after-change.
Suggestion: mark @stable APIs with a special color in doxygen docs.

#Action Items from This Meeting#

[ ] T20000111-01 [IBM]            Fix the mail archive for emails in 2000
[ ] T20000111-02 [IBM]            Provide a Web page with links to email threads for proposals in our archive
[ ] T20000111-03 [Helena]         Resend API assessment list to Bob
[ ] T20000111-04 [IBM]            Mark @stable APIs with a special color in doxygen docs

#Next Meeting Schedule#

The next ICU meeting will be held on 2000-jan-25 from 9AM-10AM PST, 12PM-1PM EST, 18:00-19:00 CET.
The call-in number and pass code will be provided at least 24 hours prior to the meeting.