Scala Meeting report, 2010-05-04

We are currently publishing 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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Scala Meeting 2010-05-04

People attending the meeting: Ingo, Miguel, Donna, Adriaan, Iulian, Phil,
Lukas, Philipp, Toni, Gilles, Martin, Hubert, Tiark.

* Current work
- cleanups in remote actors and concurrent.opts, documentation for actors
- fixes with named arguments
- general bug fixing
- work on scaladoc
- work on .NET

* Partest — what needs to be fixed
- testing is 2x slower. windows virtual box makes things even slower,
but there seems be an issue in partest that appears even on a native machine
- sometimes tests are skipped: seems to be at least a problem in the
reporter. Unclear if tests are actually being skipped; there might by a bug
in partest that does not handle timeouts properly
- critical problem: needs to be handled ASAP

* Increase in compilation time
- it is unclear what is the root cause; possibly unavoidable issues with
specialization.
- it could be something completely different, due to lots of nightly
builds not having worked
- memory consumption may be higher, so GC is running more often
- we will look into this. will compare build with and without
specialization.
- not a blocker for RC

* Large code size increase?
- we have received a report on increase in code size in an Android
application, processed using ProGuard
- It is possible that annotations (pickled Scala type signatures that
are available using reflection) are explaining some of the increases from
2.8.0.Beta1 to 2.8.0.RC1
- maybe proguard can be configured to discard them?
- New collections library may be the cause for the general 2.8 increase
- This needs to be further examined. Gilles will follow up.

* Scala 2.8 RC2: current status
- two remaining specialization bugs. at least one is critical, will look
into it and hopefully fix within the week
- issues with partest prevent from fully testing ibm5. not a blocker for RC.
- will release tomorrow unless above issues are not fixed or if there is
a new blocker

* Release Process for 2.8
- For RC2 only: 3 day period where only "benign" bug-fixes are
committed, so that external parties can test if they wish to
- To go from an RC to final, will wait for feedback from major players
- For each RC, will specify a time before which final will not be
released. this time period will be 2 weeks for RC2, but likely shorter for
(possible) future RCs.

* Do we need a Forum Czar?
- should someone in the EPFL team be "in charge" of reading the mailing
list? e.g., read messages and forward to interested parties, so that
critical discussions are not missed.
- we will that for a couple of months and see whether it is useful

* Outlook for the Scala infrastructure (move to Git, more in-house testing)
- we will create a to-do list for a future migration to Git

* Scala Days Videos
- more than 10,000 hits on the main videos page!