osCommerce Blog

I returned back home from the internal meeting on Tuesday evening and Christian had left a day before. Both the internal and public meetings were great, but had a pretty crap start myself

I originally wanted to arrive at Matthijs’ house before Christian arrived on Friday (~12PM) but had to wait for the postman to deliver the osCommerce t-shirts. I left later than planned when the t-shirts arrived, and did not actually take care of looking at how to get to Matthijs’ house as I had a navigation unit that I had full trust in.

This led to problems shortly after crossing the German/Belgium border with the navigation unit freaking out with “Cannot read file” errors and freezing on me. Hard-resetting it did not do anything and played around with it for a little while at a parking-rest section on the freeway. As I eventually got the unit to work, I looked at my surrounding area for the nearest petrol-station and headed there to fill my car up and to follow the old fashioned way of navigating by buying a map of Belgium. The unit ofcourse freaked out again during this ride but found the station without any problems.

I took the rest of the journey with the map and could every now and then bring the navigation unit up to confirm my direction.

Shortly before reaching Antwerpen I stopped at a station/café and rang Matthijs to inform that not only was I late, but am behind Antwerpen and would be at his place within an hour.

So far so good, until I hit Antwerpen.

If you need to find your way in Antwerpen, tell me as I drove in all directions looking for a way out and know every exit that doesn’t lead to the town Matthijs lives in :p

I eventually found the right direction by doing it in an even older fashioned way of asking for directions, and was set to go.

It was early evening when I reached his house and started the BBQ we had planned for that day after cooling down. In typical driving-all-day-in-hot-weather-and-swearing-at-gps-unit-while-everyone-waits-with-an-empty-stomache conditions, it started to rain as we got started. We continued with the BBQ though which should please the Natural Born Grillers out there

I think we stayed up pretty late on Friday night, to about 4am-ish, talking mainly about the public meeting being held the next day to provide consistent answers to those attending.

The main issues we discussed were about the workboard entries for MS3 and MS4, and to be up-front with those attacking the projects direction by saying “if you don’t like what we do, please go and use something else.”. This is a natural cause and is not a case of “its my way or the highway” as we’ve been adapting to the needs of the community since the beginning. This not only allows us to listen to the feedback provided, but to also concentrate on those appreciating our efforts, which is a win-win productive scenario all around!

The workboard entries for MS3/MS4 and the up-front attitude were confirmed at the public meeting. Christian took notes down of what was discussed at the meeting and was again discussed by ourselves on Sunday and Monday.

The results will be published soon on the Workboard. We will not publish a release date for MS3 until a finalized codebase is in our hands. This then gives us time to work on the documentation, packaging, press releases, etc and allows the community to stay informed via the Workboard page.

We handed out the osCommerce t-shirts at the public meeting on a first-come-first-serve principle, as not all of the t-shirts were delivered on Friday. We wrote down the addresses of those missing out and will send them a t-shirt in the coming weeks. There were no problems this time of identifying us, as we ourselves wore t-shirts too this time, which was a great improvement over the previous public meetings held

We were pleased to meet the youngest community member of 14 months, Reza, who will also be receiving an osCommerce t-shirt in the coming weeks

It was a great personal event and had a great time meeting everyone. As with the previous meetings I unfortunately did not get to speak to everyone directly but do see to it that everyone is able to speak directly with a team member that is present. Matthijs told me after the meeting that the person selling go-cart products over his store was one of the top go-cart racers in Belgium/Holland, which I would have personally liked to know more of. Perhaps at the next meeting, Laurence!

The location for the public meeting was perfect! I enjoyed the drinks I had with the others, and had a very nice dinner near the end. Most of the people that came along stayed from the beginning to the very end which was very nice to see!

In the days after the meeting, we had a lot of discussions of the milestone path and the projects direction in general. We also discussed officially removing the public CVS server as it is no longer a representation of internal development, and due to the pressure the community has provided in thinking so with the lack of development progress the project has made.

We had agreed that the public CVS server was the only way for the outside world to follow up on development, which was due to internal work remaining internal until the time for its announcement was ready. This will now change with the removal of the public CVS server with not only developers, but all team members writing entries in their blog on a weekly basis of what they have been working on, to keep the outside informed of what has been done and what we’re doing.

We are always looking for different approaches to use when one does not work out as intended, and look forward to seeing what this new approach brings.

The release cycle after the 2.2 release was also discussed in maintaining the 2.2 version while working on 2.3, and making 2.2.x releases when bug fixes occur. We are looking at releasing two stable releases a year with each newer release being easier to upgrade to than the past release. This is based on the amount of work occurring for the 2.2 Milestone 3 release, but also know that a release cannot be perfect in structure even if it is in development for 2 years

An official announcement concerning the meeting will be published as soon as the Workboard entries have been updated, and want to thank those that attended again for a great time we all had! Some photos of the public meeting will also be added to the Gallery page soon.

There are talks of having the next public meeting around October, so maybe we’ll have the opportunity to see you in person too!

Thanks again to everyone that came to the public meeting, and to Matthijs and Yolande for housing me and Christian for the event! :p