2009-11 Incubator VCL Report

VCL has been incubating since December 2008. VCL is a cloud computing platform for the management of physical and virtual machines.

The Apache VCL community is growing and people from several organizations are contributing
Questions about administration and end user use of Apache VCL are being asked and answered on the project’s vcl-dev and vcl-user lists
A growing number of community members from multiple organizations are answering questions
Collaboration is occurring for architectural design and release planning via the vcl-dev list
Code patches have been discussed on the vcl-dev list and submitted to the Jira issue tracking system

The community is working to complete the final administrative tasks required to issue the first release (Apache VCL 2.1)
Josh Thompson has volunteered to act as the release manager for 2.1 per the advice of Matt Hogstrom, one of the project mentors
PGP keys have been created and added to the distribution area
A release candidate artifact has been created and is currently being discussed
Code and documentation updates are being made to the release candidate per community consensus
The tasks required to complete the release are being discussed on the vcl-dev list
Jira is being used to track the release tasks and to assemble the release changelog
Release procedures are being documented as the community develops its release process

Procedures for handling 3rd party dependencies are being worked out by the VCL community with help from the ASF legal-discuss list
Major components of VCL are written in Perl and the Apache VCL release will only contain Perl code developed by the ASF
A Perl interpreter and supplemental Perl modules are required. These are licensed under the Artistic License, GPL, and LGPL.
Concerns were brought up by the project mentors and a question was posed to the legal-discuss list. The question was answered and we are working on implementing the recommendation.

The Apache VCL project name issue has been resolved
NCSU has taken steps to clearly indicate on its Apache VCL instance website that Apache VCL is developed by the ASF
References to NCSU have been removed from the code
NCSU employees affiliated with the Apache VCL project routinely communicate that VCL is an ASF project and encourage colleagues of other organizations to do the same

A large amount of documentation has been added to the project’s Confluence site
People from multiple organizations have contributed to improving the documentation, both by editing the pages themselves and by pointing out areas for improvement on the lists

As noted in the May 2009 report – questions were asked of the mentors regarding the rules governing wiki contributions from individuals who have not signed the CLA. It is the community’s understanding that a separate wiki will be needed – one for official documentation included with releases and one containing contributions from individual who have not signed the CLA. A request has been made to one of the mentors who had offered to create a 2nd wiki instance. This has not been completed yet.
A request has been made to the mentors to create a Confluence committers group that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
A request has been made to the mentors to create a Jira Committers role that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
Some committers have lost administrative access to Jira. The project mentors have been asked to restore the permissions.

Signed off by mentor: