Re: [PROPOSAL] Community call

2020-06-29

Dear all,

Here are the notes taken during our first community call:

```
Apache James community meeting 25 June 2020

## Turn table & presentations

IEugen Stan
Start with a Google Summer of Code implements Hbase mailbox.
Want to get back into the project because he will use James as a mail
server and to write application for his company
Interested in JMAP. The future looks nice with this new protocol

Raphael
Manage James team at linagora

Rémi
Joins Linagora for one year and a half

Mattieu

Promotor of James at Linagora
Use it too for small scale deployement too.

Gautier
Works at Linagora for 2 years.
Worked principaly on using reactor on James

René

Works for 2 years at Linagora

Duc
Join Linagora for some months

Lan
Join Linagora for some months

David
Joined the Community recently.
Canadian living in Japan.
Interested in email recently.
Have his own email server since 20 years.
Mails are ubiquitous, but are overlooked
His company want to have an extensible mail server to do some processing.
He didn'd find any good tool to process incoming mails except for James
which is a good candidate for him.
Appreciate the support from the Community

Antoine

Used to work on James.
Will work to bring CI to the Community

## Documentation & server offering

David statred a documentation effort on Antora + asciidoc.

Benoit:

- We need versioning for the documentation

- We need per -server documentation

- Documentation focused on use cases

- It would be great if we can have James extensible and provide
functionality as extensions

Matthieu:

- We need a reproducible publish process that we can trust.

- Automated publish on commit process.

- We should focus on what we can do now and not on what we could do.

Eugen:

- I can work on the documentation publishing automation.

- I believe we need to focus on email libraries / components that we can
work colaboratively on.

- Eugen would work on Antora website deployment with gradle.
Configuration should be published online for the community but not
necessarily to the end user.

David:

- I was totally confused by the documentation when I started.

- Be more clear on what James is.

- Be clear on what is  targeting developers and what targets operators.

- It would be nice to have extensions.

## Developer experience

Matthieu:

- opt-in test running

- when we started contributing, things were split but not mature enough,
many cross repository commits. We still have maturity / api-stability
issues.

- We should extract components (mailbox) when they are stable from an
API point of view.

- We have too many submodules in our project / we can leverage gradle to
reduce the number of modules

Benoit:

- We don't deploy the snapshots automatically on Apache SNAPSHOTS ???

- We can simplify things if we re-evaluate what we have and drop things
that we don't use  / maintain

Eugen:
 - Long builds, eventually failing, which can discourage potential
contributors.
 - Migrating to gradle could help, prior attempts
 - Composite builds could help for integrating separate projects
 - Almost ready for the gradle migration

 - We could group submodules based on the underlying technologies
(Cassandra, JPA) because it does not make sense to deploy Cassandra and
JPA in the same deployment.

David:

- Spring cleaning and removing of unused, older modules / components

## Apache builds

Antoine:

- I'm working to add CI build status to Github PR's

- investigation what can be done with
https://gitbox.apache.org/

Gautier:

- existing CI repository is here :
https://github.com/linagora/james-jenkins

Matthieu:

- Linagora CI do not use Jenkinsfile

- Linagora uses smoke tests to test a generated Docker image

### Comunity growth

David:

- What are the goals to grow the community?

Eugen:

- I would like to grow the comunity and awarness around James

- I plan to do some youtube videos regarding Apache James

- I plan to approach Mozilla Thunderbird comunity to collaborate on JMAP
development
```

Notes were taken here
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/46s0WfDVm6A1cUgWZ5Dk1Bte/

Best regards,

Benoit Tellier

Le 18/06/2020 à 17:02, Tellier Benoit a écrit :
> Hello all,
> 
> Eugen suggested me to be having a community call.
> 
> We have been discussing a lot lately, this could be the occasion to know
> each others better, and find some common ground between community members.
> 
> I know that live meetings tend to disconnect people (if you cannot
> attend you are excluded), thus I think we need to set up some
> organization similar to what is done within the IETF:
> 
>  - Prepare together a clear agenda
>  - Take notes that will be output on this very mailing list
> 
> Regarding the time I propose (given active people time-zones)  Thursday
> 26th June 2020, from 8am UTC to 9am UTC.
> 
> We should of course start with a turn-table so that each person gets to
> present who they are, how did they started contributing to James, what
> goals they are pursuing by contributing to 