[meeting] Notes and log - 2004-04-06

Here is a summary of our IRC meeting on April 6th, 2004.

The meeting started with a discussion about libcroco, with Bjoern and 
Nick asking for a snapshot release of Dodji's modifications, so that 
they can test it easily.

Agenda 1 : Link checker

The release went well, and the main feedback is the (old) issue of the 
link checker not following the robots exclusion protocol. While Bjoern 
and Olivier don't think it should be absolutely necessary, there is a 
need for the instance on validator.w3.org to behave nicely, and Ville 
will work on implementing the protocol by using LWP::RobotUA.

The main problem with RobotUA is that its constructor needs an e-mail 
address for contact. But the link checker can be used without any 
configuration at all, and this means that it would need to guess a good 
contact e-mail or put a default one.

Among all the possible solutions (default would be serveradmin, or an 
address at w3c, or a bogus address, or override the constructor to not 
need an address), none seemed to get everyone's vote, and the issue 
will have to be solved on the list. In the meantime Ville will override 
the constructor (if no e-mail given in config?)


Agenda 2 : Markup Validator

We discussed the timeline for the 0.6.5 release and beyond... We are 
going to work on a low-profile beta for 0.6.5b2, and a rapid release.

The fact that HEAD has gone far into development while features were 
added and bugs were fixed in 0.6 branch may not have been the best 
strategy, not to mention the issue with people downloading HEAD by 
default.
=> after the release, HEAD and 0.6 branch will be merged (bringing 
templates in) and advanced development will not be done in HEAD but in 
a new branch...

We will need to be careful (disciplined) to make our development easier 
to manage, smaller releases, more frequent and less feature-rich.

[[ ACTION - Terje to Document current and planned CVS Branch layout ]]


Nick suggested trying/looking at mod_validator for the multi-parser 
architecture, and will install a test instance on the qa-dev server for 
all to play with.

The issues about cataloguing were quickly discussed, and we agreed that 
they could not be fixed just now.

More in the IRC log, trimmed and (lightly) edited.

-- 
olivier