I think Antoine raises some good points. The server
has enough features and stability to be a 1.0, however it is lacking in
the packaging and out-of-box installation experience. This is the
polish I was referring to.
Phoenix doesn't do releases, simply because the project's purpose is
not to build extensible tools and frameworks, but to improve the
website in an open and transparent fashion. I'm not sure if the Babel
server is generic enough to be considered an extensible tool or
framework, although you (Antoine) have deployed it in house at some
point, so you are the best one to tell us if the server could/should be
a generic tool.
So the question is: should we invest effort into packaging the server
as a tool for public consumption, or should we just keep it as an
internal (but open source) tool for the purpose of producing language
packs?
Regardless of the response, I agree with Antoine that, in its current
state the server cannot be a 1.0.
Antoine Toulme wrote:
I think that before we do a release of the Babel server,
we'd need to make it available in some way. A zip, with complete
instructions to install, a mockup of the cron jobs to set up, is needed
imo.
It would also be interesting to decide if the Babel server is
for the Eclipse internal use only. If that's the case, I'm not sure we
need a release ; by the way did the Phoenix project had a release ?
Last but not least, going 1.0 at Eclipse means you define a set
of APIs, and you tatoo them on your left arm, I mean you will need to
maintain them. I would rather shoot for a nice 0.9 release.
I agree that we should release though as we are starting to have
quite a backlog on the IP side. Every time you release, you flush the
IP log and you make sure everything is ok.
Thanks,
Antoine
On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 09:35, Denis Roy <denis.roy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The Force is
strong with this one.
I will start mocking up the slides.
Denis
Kit Lo wrote:
I have a slightly different
opinion
about the mature components. Although the Message Editor is pretty
standalone
and complete, but we never made a downloadable build for that. The
testing
of the component was very limited. Nigel is the only contributor who is
familiar with the component. But, he is not very active because of
other
commitments. I'm a little concern about the enhancement and maintenance
requests when we make it available.
On the other hand, I agree that
the
Translation Server still needs some polish. But, Babel has been
consuming
the Translation Server for a while. The Translation Server has gone
through
quite a bit of testing and we've made a lot of enhancement. We also
heard
a few testimonials that a few organizations are using that to perform
Eclipse
project translation in-house. Also, Denis, Gabe, Antoine, and me (and a
new comer Sean :-) are somewhat familiar with at least some parts of
the
Translation Server. We may not have enough resources to implement major
enhancement for the translation server in a timely manner, but I'm
pretty
sure we can handle some general maintenance and bug reports.
Therefore, I'm voting to
consider
the
Translation Server as a mature component, instead of the Message Editor
:-)
Regards,
Kit Lo
IBM Eclipse SDK Globalization Technical Lead
Eclipse Babel Project Co-lead
Team,
I was discussing with Kit yesterday, and I mentioned that before we can
announce a "Babel 1.0" GA release, we need to hold a release
review. Essentially, we need to follow the steps outlined in this
document:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Development_Resources/HOWTO/Release_Reviews
There was also the question of whether or not the Messages Editor would
be part of that release review. Do we consider the Messages Editor
mature enough for a 1.0, and moving forward, will we have any resources
committed to maintaining it and carrying it forward?
For what it's worth, I think the only two components we are considering
"mature enough" for this release is the Language Packs and the
Messages Editor. The Translation Server, although it works quite
well for Babel, still needs some polish.
Thanks,
Denis
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