| [babel-dev] 4 releases of Babel a year |
The Eclipse Babel Project has limited resource. We decided to produce 2 releases a year when we started the project. It worked well with the older annual Eclipse Simultaneous Release cadence. However, it became a little confusing when Eclipse Simultaneous Release switched to a quarterly release cadence after Eclipse Photon in 2018.
Babel produced a release for every other Eclipse Simultaneous Release. Babel language pack plugins do not specify host-fragment tolerance range. Therefore, Babel language packs for one Eclipse SimRel (for example, 2020-06) can be used for another Eclipse SimRel (for example, 2020-03). Newly introduced strings in the newer release will just be ignored when the language packs are used for an older release. However, this fact is not very well known and caused a little confusion when Babel users could not find the language packs for Eclipse SimRel 2020-03.
To reduce confusion and also provide more up-to-date, complete translations to the community, I decided to contribute more time to the Babel project and produce 4 releases of Babel a year starting with Eclipse SimRel 2020-09.
The plan is to release the Babel Language Packs about 4 weeks after Eclipse Simultaneous Release (to give the community translators time to translate the final GA strings for projects). I will give my best effort to release on time. However, please understand and be patient with me, as my full-time job still takes priority. There may be occasional delay when there are conflicts with important end-of-release tasks.
It'd be helpful if the community could help test the release candidate builds in different languages and different platforms and report problems early. Together, we will provide quality translations for Eclipse projects to the community!
Tentative release date for Babel Language Packs R0.18.1 will be on October 14, 2020.
Regards,
Kit Lo
Eclipse Babel Project Lead
IBM Eclipse SDK (IES) Technical Lead and Release Manager