Callisto Simultaneous Release

Note: This page dicusses topics related to the 2006 Callisto Simultaneous Release. Most of the Callisto pages are deprecated. You are urged to find current information on pages related to the 2007 effort, currently named the Europa Simultaneous Release.

Goal

The goal of the Callisto Simultaneous Release was to release ten major Eclipse projects at the same time. Callisto was a definite success.

We did this simultaneous release to support the needs of the ecosystem members who integrate Eclipse frameworks into their own software and products. While those product producers naturally accept the ultimate responsibility for their customers' experiences, Callisto's goal was to eliminate uncertainity about project version numbers, and thus to allow ecosystem members to start their own integration, cross-project, and cross-product testing efforts earlier. Callisto was about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle; Callisto was about developers helping developers serve the whole Eclipse community.

While Callisto was about the simultaneous release of ten projects, it was not a unification of the projects - each project remained a separate open source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own project plan.

Projects Included In The Release

Downloading and Using The Callisto Simultaneous Release

The complete installation instructions are at the Callisto Update Discovery page.

Callisto CVS Projects

A number of utilities were written to automate the assembly of Callisto builds. These are available in their own CVS respository. You can find more information about how this was organized and individual project responsibilities for the build on this Eclipsepedia page: Callisto build.

Great Bugs Contest

We had a contest for great Callisto bug reports and we gave away T-shirts, iPods, and an Eclipse-brand mountain bike. Read about what consistitutes a great Callisto bug report and the simple contest guidelines/rules. The goal, of course, was to encourage the larger community to find Callisto bugs - bugs that are at the intersection and integration of projects - and we more or less succeeded.

Requirements

Projects that were part of Callisto agreed to abide by the following requirements:

  1. The projects in the Callisto Simultaneous Release must work together.
  2. All Callisto projects should have jar'ed plug-ins because this is good Eclipse citizenship.
  3. All Callisto projects should use Eclipse message bundles, not Java bundles because this is a good Eclipse citizenship.
  4. All Callisto projects must use ICU4J by RC0.
  5. All Callisto projects must use capabilities.
  6. All Callisto projects must have their own functional project update site - the Callisto site will reference these sites, not replace them.
  7. All Callisto projects must use 4-part version numbers by M5.
  8. Starting with RC1, all Callisto projects must plan not to break upstream consumers and if there is a potential breaking change, those consumers must be notified and given the chance to agree, disagree, or veto.
  9. All Callisto projects should have a written ramp down policy.

Milestone and Release Candidate Schedule

These milestone and release candidate dates are based on the dependencies of the projects (we call these the +0, +1, and +2 dependencies). Obviously, if a +0 date slips, then it will cause the +1 and +2 dates to slip; similarly for a +1 slip causing +2 slips.

The milestones and release candidate dates and project-specific version names are listed on this wiki page. The team aimed for a June 30th Callisto release.

There are two planned, optional participation, maintenance dot releases. The wiki describes the dates and processes.

Planning and Coordination

The Callisto Simultaneous Release was planned and managed by the Planning Council. The Council held coordination conference calls as follows (minutes to be posted here):

The Council established the cross-project-issues-dev@eclipse.org mailing list for, obviously, any cross project issues that arise.

Humor

From The Ten Planets: Callisto seems to have little internal structure; however there are signs from recent Galileo data that the interior materials have settled partially, with the percentage of rock increasing toward the center.