GRASS Incubation Progress

Document Purpose

The mentor will use this to inform the Incubation Committee of the project status and it will be the initial indication that a project is reaching graduation.

Basics

Has the project been approved for incubation by the OSGeo board?

Yes (but approval from GRASS community pending)

Has an Incubation Mentor been assigned to the project?

Norman Vine and Arnulf Christl are assigned mentors.

Infrastructure Transition

Note, for each of the following it isn't necessary to move to foundation infrastructure, but if you aren't a reason should be provided.

Has the projectname.osgeo.org domain been populated with the projects web presence?

http://grass.osgeo.org has been populated with initial content. More soon.

Is the OSGeo bug tracker being used for the project?

Currently the existing bug tracker is used. A migration may be possible in future.

Is the OSGeo mailing list manager being used for the project?

The announce list will be used, the other mailing lists will remain under http://grass.itc.it to maintain the long archives of emails (starting 1991).

Is the OSGeo SVN or CVS system being used for the project?

Currently the existing CVS is used. A migration may be possible in future.

Are binary and source downloads available from the OSGeo download area?

This can be easily added once the pages are better written.

Community Functioning

Is there a functioning user support mechanisms (ie. mailing list)?

Existing user support mechanisms are numerous mailing lists, IRC and WIKI. Companies are available for commercial support. There are also several national user groups. There is also a GRASS user map(server). A GRASS newsletter is also available.

Are source and binary downloads for the package available?

GRASS is a multi-platform GIS, the important operating systems are supported - see download page

Has a Project Steering Committee been formed, and given control of the project?

A RFC1 has been published to form a GRASS PSC. This issue is in discussion in the GRASS user and developers lists. Acceptance pending.

Does the Project Steering Committee have documentation on project procedures for PSC decisions, contributor guidelines, etc.

See RFC1 for a proposal. Acceptance pending.

How many active developers are there? Are they from multiple organizations?

Currently 31 developers have CVS write access. In 2006 around 16 developers of this group where active. ITC-irst (Trento) is supporting the project since 2001, universities, companies and individuals are contributing. For details, see the grass-commit mailing list archives. More than 10000 CVS commits have been done since 1st January 2000 (opening of CVS). See also CVS statistics which is part of the new GRASS Quality Assessment System.

Foundation Membership

Have project documents been updated to reflect membership in the foundation, and the relationship of the project to the foundation?

Not yet. This will occur once the GRASS Community approves the incubation.

Has an effort been made to brand the project web site with OSGeo foundation web styling and branding marks?

First an OSGeo web style has to be established. We also hope for/await the availability of a CMS from the OSGeo infrastructure.

Code Copyright Review

Has a Code Provenance Review document been prepared for the project?

Work in progress at GRASS Provenance Review.

Have issues raised in the provenance review been adequately addressed?

We have to verify around 3000 files (520000 lines of C). A big code review has been done in 1999 for the change to GPL. Another review has to be done now.