What is new in Mylyn 3.9

Two years ago I claimed that contributing to Eclipse is a tedious process and I’m happy to say that this no longer holds true. The migration from CVS to Git last year and the adoption of Gerrit for code reviews by many Eclipse projects, combined with the arrival of contributor license agreements (CLAs), has made it incredibly easy to contribute to Eclipse.

Gerrit is great news for contributors since anyone with an Eclipse.org account can now propose changes as Git commits. It’s no longer necessary to attach patches in Bugzilla; changes can be pushed directly to Gerrit. In Gerrit it’s easy to work with the changes and, if the CLA has been signed, merging contributed changes only takes committers a few clicks.

I have highlighted in previous posts how the Mylyn Gerrit Connector integrates code reviews in the IDE. When Eclipse.org added CLAs and upgraded to Gerrit 2.6 (which the Mylyn connector didn’t support at the time), I realized how much I rely on the seamless Eclipse integration. Thanks to Tomasz Zarna contributed over 20 changes and didn’t shy away from using the browser Gerrit 2.6 is now supported in the latest Mylyn service release and will soon be available as part of Kepler SR1.

In addition to supporting the latest Gerrit, Bugzilla and Hudson version, Mylyn, and the Gerrit the connector in particular, have seen a number of improvements in the last major release. The code review editors are now complemented by a Review navigator. The navigator view shows all comments in a structured view that simplifies keeping track of parallel discussion streams as code review progress.

Global comments are now embedded in the review editor, with support for spell checking, and comments can be saved as drafts and edited offline. Conveniently, the editor now also supports all patch set operations including rebase.

The Mylyn New & Noteworthy has an overview of all enhancements in the latest release which is available here.