Scala Meeting report, 2009-10-13

Following previous discussions on the mailing lists, we will begin
publishing, as an experiment, a summary of each of the weekly meetings of
the Scala Core Team.

This information is made available as a service to the community. It is by
necessity rather brief and gives only a rough approximation of the main
points of discussions explored during each meeting; it should not be taken
as a source of reliable information, nor as a record of concrete or firm
decisions, nor as anything other than a record of a simple discussion.

The summary that follows is primarily intended for Scala contributors and
maintainers. If you are not a contributor to the Scala system, the
information below is unlikely to be very useful to you, and you might lack
some of the necessary background to make sense of all the discussion items.

We do not have enough people on the team to be able to write a more
complete record, and we might also not have the resources to discuss every
point in detail afterwards. Nevertheless, we hope that this record, cursory
as it is, is better than nothing.

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Report from the Scala Core Team meeting, 2009-10-13:

People attending the meeting: Martin, Lukas, Tiark, Adriaan, Phil, Alex,
Donna, Philipp, Hubert, Eugene, Gilles, Toni.

Topics discussed:

* Work is progressing on the new immutable vector implementation; some
method names are still not fully satisfactory, so some renaming may occur

* Documentation: after the 2.8 beta is out, people in the Core Team shoud
set aside some time to write documentation for new 2.8 features. In detail,
the following need (more) documentation:
- specialization
- CPS transform
- packrat parsing
- swing
- manifests
- prioritised implicits (Martin is updating the SLS with this and other
stuff)
- context bounds (a generalization of view bounds)

* Testing: Hudson gets stuck on the IBM 1.6 VM. We'll try updating the VM
initially, as the version we use for testing right now is rather old.

* 2.7.7:

- A nasty bug was present in the IzPack installer script (#1433). That
has been fixed and backported to 2.7.x

- Ticket #1535 was reported as a bug against 2.7.7.RC1. Backported fix,
we'll release an RC2 including these two fixes probably on Wednesday. If no
further problems are reported, we'll release the final around next Tuesday.
Decision during the next meeting.

- Josh asks for a backport of changes to the scalac ant task. This goes
a bit beyond stability maintenance and fixes to critical bugs, so we'll not
include it in 2.7.7. That is done in order to avoid possible problems
deriving from a new, albeit minor, feature. Maybe 2.7.8.

* 2.8 beta:

- We hope to have Miles provide us with a working Eclipse plugin in
about 3 weeks. Command completion is reportedly not working yet, but
hyperlinking is working.
- Can we test the dependency manager without Eclipse? It is a
daemon-like tool. Miles took over maintenance.
- Iulian will organise a telephone meeting with Miles for next week to
discuss status
- Donna will think about a tool to merge abstract scaladoc changes into
source, and will liaise with the community concerning tools to work
collaboratively on documentation

* Community:

- Following discussions between David and Martin, part of the release
process will be moved out into the community. They will test pre-releases
against ScalaTest, ScalaCheck, Lift, etc., and give us the green light for
the final release.

- Finally, periodic meeting notes will be released on the
scala-internals list; Toni will do that.