BIRT Notes: April 6 2007

You may have noticed that last weeks update was posted today. In the future, I am going to try and do this every week on Friday or Saturday. For this week, you get the special bonus of two weekly update in one week.

This weeks activities were primarily focused on fixes and enhancements to the CrossTab control which should be in the M6 build and to fixing any blocker bugs that would prevent the M6 build. I expect to see the M6 release candidate any time now and hopefully we will have a release for Monday.

Since I don't have a lot about new features to report, I thought I would provide some information about how I am compiling this list. Many of the committers for this project work for Actuate, I don't. We sometimes get questions about are communication channel, with the assumption being that most communication is done through private channels. The truth is that we work very hard to keep the BIRT development process as open as possible in accordance with the Eclipse Foundation guidelines. All of the information used to put this weekly status comes through the open channels. If you are interested in a complete description of the communication process please have a look at the this post on the BIRT home.

When ever one of the BIRT committers checks in code to one of the CVS repositories they send an email to the BIRT-DEV mail list. This week was a relatively quiet week with only 94 items entered over the last seven days. All of the developers use a standard template for the mail list. At the bottom of this post, I pick on one of our committers, Wei Wang, and show one of his submissions.

I scan the daily commits every day and can quickly see what the developers have been working on. Typically, must bug fixes do not make it into the weekly update. Those fixes that implement a major feature will also reference the BIRT Project Specification (BPS) and the bugs that are attached to it. Typically those are the issues that make it into the list. Now we all know that sometimes the developers are more interested in writing code rather than writing documentation about the code (not me of course), so in some cases I refer to the Bugzilla entry. Typically the BIRT committers do a really good job of describing their latest contribution to the project.

There are two other places that I get information about the project. First, the weekly Project Management Committee (PMC) meeting happens every Monday. At the PMC, we cover the most significant project issues and get a weekly status on the development efforts. The final place that I pick up information about the project is on the BIRT newsgroup. The BIRT newsgroup is a really great place to see how BIRT is being used and to get feedback on the project. Thanks to all of the awesome community members who have used the BIRT newsgroup.

If anyone has ideas on how I can improve this process, let me know.

- Summary:
Fix Bugzilla Bug 177695 --- Error occurs in JUnit test of org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.html.tests in daily build 20070315

- Bugzilla Bug (s) Resolved:
177695

- Description:
Fix Bugzilla Bug 177695 --- Error occurs in JUnit test of org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.html.tests in daily build 20070315

- Tests Description :
Unit Test

- Notes to Build Team:
None

- Notes to Developers:
None

- Notes to QA:
None

- Notes to Documentation:
None

- Files Edited:
org/eclipse/birt/report/engine/emitter/html/HTMLReportEmitterTestCase.java

- Files Added:
None

- Files Deleted
None

- Wei Wang
Actuate Software(Shanghai) Co.,Ltd