GeoTools Incubation Progress

GeoTools is one of the round of projects out of the gate, and as an rather old project (lots of background) with an active development community (who is busy hacking) does not expect to finish all that quickly.

Representative: Jody Garnett (jgarnett@refractions.net)

Initial Impressions

Judging from the email list the number one question is, what needs to be done? Rather wait we are going to wing it and hope for futher direction.

The GeoTools community responded with the following questions: - something from richard - something from bryce? What about Public domain?

What is in a Name

GeoTools is a common name, that many conferences, other open source projects and so on try to adopt. Yes we know it is obvious.

Since the project has been going for 10 years (congrats) in a very public manner with out complaint we are going to keep on keeping on.

If pressed we will adopt the name "GeoTools.org" and call it a day.

IP Check

We don't know if everyone who worked on geotools is even alive, let alone how to find the ones that are still ticking. This is a problem.

"svn blame" is almost an answer:

Create a perl script that can process svn blame
Get a list of names
Module maintainers will need to hunt down those involved and beat a Contributor Agreements out of them

But it is not a complete answer:

It only shows who has done what (per line) most revently
Svn is backed on to a berkly DB, and we can ask someone (hi paul) to query the heck out of this database and give us report, by module
If this is too hard I would be content with an SVN blame check based on the 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 releases

If a module maintainer cannot document a change for a section of code they will need to re implement. Sad but true.

module

The module section of code is kind of lame and has a long tangled history. It started off as "core" and contained implemtnatoins for all the interfaces we had ever defined. It may even of contained the interfaces. The conversion notes are in confluence.

Conversion? Yeah we converted it - into a single module called "main" (because we could not manage our build as everything was so brittle). This was done for GeoTools 2.0, for geotools 2.2 things are breaking up along different lines: - API - Jody Garnett - Capturing the (from main) interfaces that have been through a Q&A check - MAIN - PMC - sad but the definition of PMC was almost module maintainer of main for a while -- filter/expresison - cory -- rendering - jesse - REFERENCING - martin - LEGEND - andrea (may just want it deleted) - ...

plugins

Plugins are bits of functionality that implement all the great stuff that makes geotools useful. They slot in at the various layers defined by the libary and are nice and targetted: - postgis: justin - oracle: marc - ...

ext =

Extentions and Functionality built on GeoTools. - graph - justin - validation - jody -

demo

Demos and Examples ... - property - jody