[vtk-developers] Meeting minutes

[David Gobbi]

First of all, a big thanks to David D. for posting this to the list
and the wiki.  VTK is an open-source project, so all organizational &
engineering discussion relating to VTK should be kept as open as
possible.

I have a very keen interest in the VTK journal.  At the very least I
hope to be a conspicuous critic of the submissions.  And if I don't
submit something to it soon, can someone please give me a good kick in
the rear end?

Is there a good forum for discussing the journal?  Even though I
absolutely love the idea behind the Insight/MIDAS/VTK journal, there
are some details of the implementation drive me insane.

   David


On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Marcus D. Hanwell
<marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
> 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
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