December doings

December 2009 was a short but productive month. I worked with the Karen Tsao (Stanford) on Test & Quizzes, Nuno Fernandes (Universidade Fernando Pessoa) on SiteStats, Megan May (Indiana) on Messages and Forums, Chuck Severance (Michigan) on BasicLTI and Steve Swinsburg (Australian National University) on Profile2/profile classic. My contribution involved refactoring each project's Maven pom files and adding an assembly module in order to automate the generation of stable tags and binaries. In 15 days I reworked the poms/assemblies of 8 projects and then released stable tags and binaries for each. In addition I tweeked the Sakai kernel in support of Profile2 and released kernel-1.1.0-beta06. All these projects are destined for deployment with our upcoming Sakai 2.7.0 release (Q1 2010).

emailtemplateservice-0.4.0 (3. Dec.)
msgcntr-2.7.0-a01 (7 Dec.)
sakai-mock-2.7.0-b01 (8 Dec.)
scheduler-2.7.0-b01 (9 Dec.)
sitestats-2.1.0-b01 (9 Dec.)
profile-2.7.0-b01 (17 Dec.)
profile2-1.3.3 (18 Dec.)
kernel-1.1.0-beta06 (24 Dec.)

David Horwitz (UCT), Seth Theriault (Columbia), Alan Berg (UvA), Jean-François Lévêque (Université Pierre et Marie Curie) and I held a very productive release management meeting in early December. We reviewed tickets associated with our planned Sakai 2.5.6 and 2.6.2 maintenance releases and decided which issues we would target for inclusion. Collaboration of this type, involving a release management team working out of five universities (I'm at Michigan) and distributed across three continents is an aspect of the Sakai Community experience that is hard to replicate elsewhere.

We pushed hard to release both Sakai 2.5.6 and Sakai 2.6.2 before the holiday break but we were blocked by a couple of unresolved issues. So on Christmas Eve, like old Fezziwig's apprentices, we put the shutters up and closed down the shop for a bit of holiday cheer.