Configuration Management Meetings

Agendas and Minutes

Agenda for 2012-08-28

• Discuss terminology and draft RDF vocabulary

Minutes for 2012-08-21

Attending: Nick, David, Mike, Steve S, Sandeep, Gray, CJ Paul, Niklas, Cheryl, Kartik, Peter

• We first discussed the idea of having alternate meetings at a different time. From the Doodle poll, the best alternative was at 11am US/Pacific on Wednesday, but this was very late for everyone in Europe. After a very brief discussion, the group agreed to leave the current time (Tuesday 6am) for all meetings.
• CJ Paul and Cheryl from Tivoli introduced themselves as new members of the group.
• Nick reminded group members to add their names to the Configuration Management home page on the wiki, and to the OSLC SCM mailing list. Nick and Steve will review whether this group will continue to use that SCM mailing list, or create a new one.
• We then continued the review of configuration management and baseline scenarios, starting with 'control the use' - Nick and Mike elaborated the proposal for separate status/workflow objects, trying to keep baselines truly immutable. Steve made the point that with RDF, a provider cannot guarantee true immutability of a resource, since any provider can make new assertions about any resource simply by including a triple with that resource as its subject.
• Nick agreed to write a draft suggestion for the separate workflow idea, send this to Mike for review, then forward to Config Mgt, PLM, and Change Mgt workgroups for discussion.
• Nick walked through the 'high ceremony requirement-driven development' scenario. Mike commented how again much of this was process / workflow, and effectivity. Nick agreed, but pointed out how there were some important configuration management aspects: the ability to create configurations from scratch, the ability to create configurations that included, referenced, or depended on other configurations, the ability to freeze/snapshot a configuration, and the ability to have links in the context of a configuration.
• Sandeep suggested we need to define the terminology - and to do so in terms of specific RDF vocabulary definitions, so it would not just be ambiguous English. Nick thought that scenario elaboration and terminology / RDF vocal development had to occur somewhat in conjunction with each other, but agreed that now we had reviewed all the original use cases, it was time for a pass on terminology and vocabulary. Nick undertook to start a draft vocabulary definition on the wiki, and the group would review this draft and the terminology page next week.

Minutes for 2012-08-14

Attending: Nick Crossley, Niklas Larsen, Sandeep Kohli, Mike Loeffler, Peter Hack

• Nick asked all participants to add their names to the Config Mgt wiki.
• The group than reviewed the scenarios, starting with the primary scenario of a cross-tool, cross-domain baseline.
  Mike: baseline creation is like release process - it has a workflow, many people participate, and the release is built up and then snapshotted at some time.
• Sandeep asked if we need closure of links - how do we decide what is part of a config. Nick: a baseline certainly needs to have enuerable contents, potentially found through delegation to the underlying providers. A modifiable configuration might need enumeration of contents, though is not yet completely clear. Mike - a baseline should be just a frozen config.
• Mike - not sure about having any modifiable props on baseline - prefer to handle this by having other modifiable resources for workflow process that point to baselines. Mike volunteered to demo this in PLM context, probably a bit later when more of the group was back from vacation.
• Mike also brought up the topic of variability and effectivity; we need to see how those concepts fit in with configurations, baselines, and their properties.
• Nick asked participants to review old Core workgroup baseline proposals, to see two different past approaches - even though neither of them may be quite what we want today.

Meeting Logistics

Nick Crossley will normally host the telecons. Here are the details.

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