Scala Meeting report, 2009-11-17

We are currently 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, 2009-11-17:

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

Topics discussed:

* Current work:
- more work on running the compiler on .Net and Scala integration
package for Visual Studio.
- bug fixing
- released Beta1-RC1
- improvements to the uniqueness type-checker plugin (now capable of
dealing with large programs)
- speed improvements to the optimizer, now 2x faster

* Review script:
- Committers can autogenerate code review requests on the Review Board
via a new script:
$ test/review 19442
opens a browser with a fresh review request for the changes in
revision 19442.
- In most cases, however, the review will instead be auto generated
using a post-commit SVN hook. The hook will be triggered based on SVN
commit messages.
- message contains "review by xyz" to have a review request be
automatically generated for user "xyz"
- message contains "community review" to have a review request be
automatically generated for scala_community
- "future review" so that no review request is generated, for example
for larger development that ought to be reviewed as a whole.
- we will close tickets optimistically (at commit-time) even though
review is pending, so that others may already try the fix

* Benchmarks:
- The benchmarking page is stuck at one month ago. Work is undergoing to
unstuck it and to reduce fluctuations.
- We will add to test/bench some reference tests for the performance of
critical points in the library and compiler (for example equality). These
tests will not be run automatically for now.
- benchmarks can inherit from scala.testing.Benchmark

* Releases:
- Scala 2.8 beta candidate. How was it received?
- fixed a bug failing lift
- RC was a bit confusing (some people did not get it's an "RC for beta")
- When is the beta or the next candidate?
- we already tested and tuned the scripts used for creating releases
with this candidate, so we can rely on nightlies for the time being

* Test cases:
- Someone is asking what help to provide for testing. Paul gave a useful
answer (work on collection tests).
- When Tiark comes back, he'll kindly write a message explaining our
ideas for coverage testing, as a reminder to the community.

* Scala Extension Repository:
- Apparently, there will be a Scala extension repository, but in what
form and shape?
- Idea for a better name: Scala Greenhouse
- Paul would be a good manager
- Set up, technically:
- first work on branch in incubator, later merge to the greenhouse branch:
- greenhouse: a branch of master that tracks our svn trunk, basically
staging for what should go in the distribution later
- Contributions:
- external contributions, internal stuff which is not yet stable but
should become part of trunk
- new libraries (scala-IO, parallel collections, Paul's Zero,
Enumeration extension, STMs)
- compiler plugins
- extensions to existing core libraries (how to do it technically?
have a branch, merge from trunk. probably easier with git)