Hi Martin,
I think this spreadsheet is excellent.
I would change a couple of things:
1) A bit too much seems to come under the "release engineer" umbrella - I think that long term those items can/should be there, but in the short term there is technical debt that should be picked up. This applies marketplace + redundant libraries entries.
2) I don't think updating the installer for PGP should be under the release engineer - it is a shorter term specific contract. Of course the actual release engineer may be best suited for this job. This is somewhat the same argument as (1)
3) In light of the above, I would put in some initial estimates for what kind of contract work it is to clean those things up.
- cleanup marketplace, catchup is a matter of days or less, because Ed has done the heavy lifting. This assumes a blanket / automated approach. The debt part of this could grow much further because even installable projects may (and many probably do) fail to do anything useful at runtime. This is particularly evident with things that access internal APIs of Eclipse Platform, they install fine, but fail at runtime.
- pgp installer - Ed - how much work is this?
- remove redundant versions - start with JNA and JAXB redundancies - I have spent plenty of time on these myself and I think the big job is getting individual under resourced projects up to speed again (ECF for JNA and Mylyn for JAXB). There are probably other libraries, but I don't know what they are off the top of my head.
HTH
Jonah