Title: 2009-11 Incubator VCL Report

VCL has been incubating since December 2008. VCL is a cloud
computing platform for the management of physical and virtual machines.

### Community Involvement
* The Apache VCL community is growing and people from several organizations
are contributing
* Questions about administration and end user use of Apache VCL are
being asked and answered on the project's vcl-dev and vcl-user lists
* A growing number of community members from multiple organizations are
answering questions
* Collaboration is occurring for architectural design and release planning
via the vcl-dev list
* Code patches have been discussed on the vcl-dev list and submitted to
the Jira issue tracking system

### Release Preparation - Apache VCL 2.1
* The community is working to complete the final administrative tasks
required to issue the first release (Apache VCL 2.1)
* Josh Thompson has volunteered to act as the release manager for 2.1
per the advice of Matt Hogstrom, one of the project mentors
* PGP keys have been created and added to the distribution area
* A release candidate artifact has been created and is currently being
discussed
* Code and documentation updates are being made to the release candidate
per community consensus
* The tasks required to complete the release are being discussed on the
vcl-dev list
* Jira is being used to track the release tasks and to assemble the release
changelog
* Release procedures are being documented as the community develops its
release process

### 3rd Party Dependencies
* Procedures for handling 3rd party dependencies are being worked out by
the VCL community with help from the ASF legal-discuss list
* Major components of VCL are written in Perl and the Apache VCL release
will only contain Perl code developed by the ASF
* A Perl interpreter and supplemental Perl modules are required.
These are licensed under the Artistic License, GPL, and LGPL.
* Concerns were brought up by the project mentors and a question was posed
to the legal-discuss list. The question was answered and we are
working on implementing the recommendation.

### Project Name
* The Apache VCL project name issue has been resolved
* NCSU has taken steps to clearly indicate on its Apache VCL instance
website that Apache VCL is developed by the ASF
* References to NCSU have been removed from the code
* NCSU employees affiliated with the Apache VCL
project routinely communicate that VCL is an ASF
project and encourage colleagues of other organizations to do the same

### Documentation
* A large amount of documentation has been added to the project's
Confluence site
* People from multiple organizations have contributed to improving the
documentation, both by editing the pages themselves and by pointing out
areas for improvement on the lists

### Unresolved Issues
* As noted in the May 2009 report -- questions were asked of the mentors
regarding the rules governing wiki contributions from individuals who have
not signed the CLA. It is the community's understanding that a separate
wiki will be needed -- one for official documentation included with
releases and one containing contributions from individual who have not
signed the CLA. A request has been made to one of the
mentors who had offered to create a 2nd wiki instance. This has
not been completed yet.
* A request has been made to the mentors to create a Confluence committers
group that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
* A request has been made to the mentors to create a Jira Committers role
that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
* Some committers have lost administrative access to Jira. The
project mentors have been asked to restore the permissions.

### Top Issues Before Graduation
* Complete the release of Apache VCL 2.1
* Continue to increase contributors from multiple institutions

Signed off by mentor:

* Alan Cabrera, Kevan Miller