[vtk-developers] Meeting minutes

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Thursday 17 December 2009 16:03:37 David Doria wrote:
> All,
> 
> Thanks for a good meeting this afternoon. It may be worth scheduling these
> once in a while. I've taken the liberty to summarize the discussion. I have
> also posted it here for posterity:
> http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/VTK/Meeting_Minutes/December_17,_2009

It was great to meet you and discuss VTK, docs, development. I added a new 
code snippet yesterday to vtkWeakPointer I forgot to mention - these are the 
kind of compact snippets I find very useful when using a new class for the 
first time.

http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkWeakPointer.html

Also working on a fix for the larger Doxygen bug, this may involve using 1.5.1 
until a recent release can be fixed.
> 
> I have bolded the action items for those it may concern. Volunteers for
>  this missing "whos" are welcome!!
> 
> ==Examples==
> *Bill Lorensen and David D.* will continue cleaning up examples and move
> them into the repository. An undergraduate intern could potentially help
> with this. David D. will do some recruiting. Bill is setting up a clever
> testing system so the examples can be tested without adding anything to the
> code.
> 
> ==Junior Jobs (JJ)==
> A way to mark bugs as "easy to fix" for beginners to get their hands wet.
> This would be a nice addition to mantis. *How* would we implement this?

These are widely used, and I think they provide a great entry point for new 
contributors. I think this could either be marking the jobs title, such as 
"JJ:", or "[JJ]", or even "[Junior Job]". A new field could also be added by 
someone with admin rights to Mantis I think. This would probably require some 
planning and approval from people with power.
> 
> ==Dashboard division==
> It would be nice to divide the VTK dashboard into sections (Graphics,
> Filters, etc) using the new CDash functionality Bill Hoffman demonstrated.
> This would alleviate the problem of receiving a dashboard error email every
> time you commit something even if it has nothing to do with your change. *
> Who* can implement this?

I will hopefully talk to Bill about this soon. It sounds like the build system 
changes would not be too invasive, and should be ignored by older CMake 
versions. I think this would really improve the quality of the results from 
CDash. I could tentatively volunteer, dependent on finding out how much time 
would be involved in this change.
> 
> ==VTK Journal Repository==
> Submitting code to the VTK journal is slightly awkward, and maintaining it
> (zipping and resubmitting) is hard. Adding a sandbox repository or teaching
> everyone how to use git functionality to "post" code is a good idea.
> *Who*can look into this?
> 
> ==StackOverflow for VTK==
> (http://stackoverflow.com/) Enabling a new means of communication to end
> users may allow us to get feedback from a larger group. This forum-type
> setting can be moderated by some intermediate level users (David D.
> volunteered) and problems can be "promoted" to the user or devel mailing
> list if they are not solved by peer users. This will free up some of the
> experts time to work on larger issues. *Marcus* has volunteered to look
>  into this.

I was referring to Stack Exchange, where they will host an instance. 
Unfortunately the technology is not open source, it looks like we might be 
able to get free hosting during the beta phase, and consider the value of the 
service during the trial? 

http://www.stackexchange.com/

The http://stackoverflow.com/ site shows the full, populated version I was 
thinking of. In my opinion this would be a better option than a web based 
forum as it is so focused to questions, answers, code, metadata. As it is a 
closed product I am not sure how much access/control we get over the 
underlying data.
> 
> ==VTK Conference/Workshop==
> *Luis* mentioned we may be thinking about hosting a
> workshop/hack-a-thon/camp. Maybe meetings like todays can become a little
> more regular and we can evolve it into a bigger event with some more
> outsiders?
> 
As I mentioned, events such as Camp KDE, aKademy and other focused workshops 
are great events that help to build community. I would be very interested in 
taking part in such a meeting, as well as helping with the organization. There 
is a whole CMake community out there that may also want to get involved, 
depending on the scope of the conference.

I will be attending Camp KDE in January to talk about CMake, testing, software 
process and to run a CMake tutorial for KDE developers. KDAB are also offering 
Qt training at the event, with talks from others in the community. I will also 
hopefully throw in some cool 3D images from chemistry, engineering etc as 
general audiences always love the eye candy even if they are not sure what 
they do ;-)

Marcus
-- 
Marcus D. Hanwell, Ph.D.
R&D Engineer, Kitware Inc.
(518) 881-4937