Velocity board report - February 2007

[Will Glass-Husain <wg...@apache.org>]

Apache Velocity February 2007 Board Report

General Information

(As our esteemed chair Henning Schmiedehausen is on vacation this
month, this quarter's report is being prepared by Will Glass-Husain).

The Velocity project is inches away from the eagerly anticipated
release of Velocity 1.5, the first major release of our engine in
almost three years.  December and January saw a flurry of activity in
cleaning up last minute bugs, updating documentation, and preparing
the release.

We have had passionate recent discussion on the dev and private list
about release procedure.  In part, this is due to the anticipated
visibility of the Velocity 1.5 release and in part due to the
relatively young nature of the Velocity TLP / PMC as we establish
correct release practice.

For recent beta / rc releases we have had a "vote-then-build" process
in which a PMC member announces they are ready to release, a vote is
held, then the release is shipped.  In mid-January such a vote was
announced for Velocity 1.5.  Midway through the vote one of the PMC
members expressed concern that there were no binaries to examine.  A
consensus opinion urged a switch to a "build-then-vote" procedure and
the current vote was tabled.  A few days later, a second vote was held
to release Velocity 1.5 with +1's from almost all parties except for a
last-minute -1 (from a  different PMC member).  The concerns driving
the -1 vote were not serious (minor documentation / site issues), but
the -1 voter felt strongly that these issues should be addressed
before release.  (Being a release vote, the -1 was not binding but our
release manager agreed to table the release in light of the concerns).

A frustrating aspect of this process was that these issues could not
be directly fixed, but needed to wait for the vote to conclude, then a
rebuild of the distro then a new vote.  The departure of our chair
(who had been driving the release) on a month-long vacation has
temporarily paused this process.  Will Glass-Husain has offered to
push the release through to conclusion in the meantime but personal
committments have led to a several week delay.

In related news, we have prepared a press release for distribution
regarding the Velocity 1.5.  Due to the wide-spread use of this
library in the Java community we anticipate getting plenty of
attention when the release occurs.  The release was shared with the
PRC committee list (which was somewhat unresponsive) but suggestions
for improvements were received from several members.

The Velocity project has no board-level issues at this time.


Community Changes

No new committers were voted in since the last board report. No new
PMC members were voted in since the last board report.


Velocity Engine project

As noted above, the entire Velocity community is eagerly awaiting the
upcoming release of Velocity 1.5.  We fully expect this release to
conclude as previously predicted during Q1.


Velocity Tools project

Velocity Tools 1.3 was released on February 8.  Work on the next 1.x
version has already begun.


Velocity DVSL project

There were no changes in the DVSL code base. No DVSL development
happened in the last month.

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