May 9 2007 - P1778 workgroup Meeting Minutes

• Workgroup: P1778 - Esterel v7 language standardization
• Location: Teleconference (see Next Meeting to connect)
• Date: May 9 2007
• Chair: Gerard Berry
• Vice Chair: Stephen Edwards
• Secretary: Sylvan Dissoubray

Attendance

• See Attendance Record for meetings participation history

Agenda

• List of participants and recording of their membership requests
• Call for patents
• Agenda approval
• Recording of candidates for Secretary and Vice-Chair
• Definition of the working group internal working procedures
• Distribution of the first proposal for two chapters of the standard document: data types and arithmetics
• Next steps and actions identification.
• Date and form of the next meeting.

Process

List of participants and recording of their membership request

See Attendance Record for the list of participants to the meeting.

As the first P1778 WG meeting, participants have to request their membership in the workgroup. All participants have requested membership, and as participants of the first workgroup meeting, they are accepted members.

Call for patents

The IEEE requirements regarding patents are available from IEEE Patent Policy

The IEEE patent policy is read and participants are asked about knowledge of any patents related to the worgroup standardization.

'''Stepen Edwards''' mentions the existence of a patent relative to a method of compilation of the Esterel language kernel. It does not impact the language definition proper and should not restrict ability to implement compilers using the future standardized language. Stephen Edwards will provide details about this patent to the workgroup, and the IEEE process about patents will be conducted.

'''Raphael Bernhard''' mentions the existence of another patent relative to a method of compilation of the language held by France Telecom. The same comments and process will be applied to this one.

No other patent issues are raised.

Agenda approval

The agenda is approved by all participants.

Recording of candidates for Secretary and Vice-Chair

Gerard Berry explains that he chairs the first workgroup meeting and has appointed Sylvan Dissoubray as secretary for this meeting. GB candidates for chair, and SD candidates for secretary. At present, there is no need for a treasurer. A Vice-Chair candidate is requested. Reinhard von Hanxleden and Stephen Edwards express interest. They discuss offline and propose a candidate to the workgroup after the meeting. At the time of writing the minutes, they decided to propose Stephen Edwards as candidate for Vice-Chair.

The election shall be performed by mail within 14 days after the meeting.

Definition of the working group internal working procedures

• '''Workgroup organization''' is discussed interactively. WG will start operating according to the guidelines below, and adapt if needed:

• Face-to-face meetings should be held during conferences and tradeshows.
• All participants agree that technical work teleconferences should be held monthly.
• Member admission:
  • attending first meeting and having expressed membership request gives membership.
  • attending two teleconferences in a row gives membership
• Member revokation:
  • failing to attend 3 teleconferences in a row results in membership revokation. Membership can be regained by attending two meetings in a row.

• Document and web distribution

The existing document will be distributed for comments chapter by chapter. Soon after this meeting, the chapter about data will be distributed. In parallel, the LRM will be rewritten according to IEEE style guide in framemaker. The style guide will be put on the wiki. The style guide is very precise about typographic rules and some vocabulary requirements, but, it does not itself sufficiently defines the structure and organization of a standard manual. Since SystemC is an IEEE standardized language available for free, it can be taken as an initial model.

It has to be noted that once the standard is adopted by IEEE the LRM will only be distributed by IEEE, not free of charge. Other documents like user guides and example books will still be authorized but the LRM itself will be IEEE copyrighted. SystemC is an exception since it is available for free from systemC website. Klaus will ask to W. Rosenstiel who participated in SystemC standardization how this was made possible.

• '''Wiki'''

A wiki will be set up for collaborative work. It will be accessible to all workgroup members, with a login. It will contain two kinds of pages: process and information pages, not editable, and pages for technical collaborative work, including the LRM chapters and discussion. Participants ask the text itself to be available in the wiki to authorize for in-place changes and comments in the discussion page. Also, work should be organized to minimize the distance between the framemaker-formatted text and the wiki collaboratively developed text. Formal approval and votes of the draft LRM will of course apply to the formatted document only.

Wiki help and guidelines will be provided (Done: see Wiki help).

A public page available from IEEE website will mirror the workgroup administration and information about the project. It is not advised by IEEE to make publicly visible the LRM discussions to non-workgroup members.

Technical topics

Distribution of the first proposal for two chapters of the standard document: data types and arithmetics

The chapters will actually be delivered for discussion in turn, starting with the data and arithmetics chapters.

Later chapters may be linked together, which may be incompatibe with independent reviews. GB proposes to provide a partial order of chapters to better organize reviews. The data chapter certainly has maximal independence from the rest and is as such a perfect choice to start with.

The whole current manual will aslo be made available in source form from the wiki.

Next steps and actions identification

Set up of a wiki space for the workgroup collaborative technical work.

Date and form of the next meeting

'''Next teleconference meeting is planned Wednesday May 30th at 5PM CET.'''

Meeting is closed at 5h59 PM CET.