Hello folks,
As discussed at recent
CDT calls I propose we do a big set of changes in the next few months. Please read the rest of this email as a proposal (or set of proposals) and approve or share your concerns of them.
CDT 11.0 - New Major Release
- It has been a couple of years, and 8 minor version releases, since CDT 10.0 and there are starting to be an accumulating number of API issues that would be well solved with a new major version.
- Although we do have a process that allows us to change API after a two year notification period (in the same way that Eclipse Platform does) - it is cleaner to follow semantic versioning where possible.
- We don't anticipate that the breaking changes will be major items, nor require adopters to do significant changes. Possibly the most disruptive change is Java 17 - see next item.
- In combination with the other items in this email, a major new version of CDT makes sense
Java 17
- Some of CDT's dependencies that will be released in 2022-09 already have Java 17 as a requirement. CDT now has to build against older versions of some dependencies already because of this.
- Therefore along with CDT 11, the BREE of CDT will be increased to Java 17
- Java 17 language features will be allowed in CDT source code.
Migration to GitHub
- The Eclipse Foundation has announced plans to shutdown many of the servers Eclipse CDT uses over the coming year(s).
- Therefore Eclipse CDT will move the following to GitHub:
- Gerrit -> GitHub + Pull Requests
- Bugzilla -> GitHub Issues
- Eclipse Wiki -> end of life, content folded into docs + markdown in main repo
- Eclipse Forums -> GitHub Discussions
- eclipse.org/cdt -> README in root of repo (Note that eclipse.org/cdt is not being shutdown exactly, but the website is super out of date and will be changing location to cdt.eclipseprojects.io)
- Eclipse Jenkins is not being shutdown and we will continue to use it. We probably will start using some GitHub actions too though.
- I have created a tracking issue that covers all the items that need to be done for the migration. The todo list is probably incomplete, but we can all add to it as we identify other stuff that needs to be done
- I have already written the first draft of the readme, contribution guide, policy, migration guide and a few other pages in my fork and I will merge them once we get to that stage in the approvals.
Timeline
- Migrate to GitHub in July - exact timeline to be negotiated with Eclipse Webmasters
- Release CDT 10.7.x for the 2022-09 simrel from the cdt_10_7 branch, but built from GitHub. We may simply include CDT 10.7.0 again in 2022-09 if there are no compelling/critical changes.
- Release CDT 11.0 for the 2022-12 simrel
Please share your thoughts/approvals/concerns. I would like to ask the Eclipse Webmaster in one week to schedule the migration.
Jonah
