Mickael,
These are general comments, and are certainly not meant as a criticism of you or Red Hat. You guys are very helpful in a lot of critical areas. That said…
I could imagine the Eclipse Foundation doing something along these lines. But I am not really sure it is of much value if there are no resources to work on things. The status quo for quite some time has been that there are insufficient resources helping on the platform to make the progress we all want. Actually, it’s not just the platform: it is pretty much everything under the topic of code and processes involved in the “common good”. Has something changed in these areas to warrant the EF to make such an investment?
In addition to the above, it seems that a lot of the user issues I’ve seen are specifically related to the Java IDE. We can talk all we want about how Eclipse is a general platform and there are many tools and languages supported, but for the vast majority of users the Java development tools is what they mean when they say “Eclipse”. The Java IDE is another area which has felt under-resourced for a long time. Are there resources – including user experience resources – available to make significant enhancements there?
Complaining about the status quo is always good sport. Actually showing up with the developers necessary to make and maintain those changes is how we tell who’s serious around here. I am certainly not going to have the EF promote a bunch of changes to the release train process, the EPP packaging process, end-user feature analysis, etc. unless the people and companies calling for change actually commit some long-term resources for both the enhancements and operations needed. Or alternatively they can demonstrate that the people currently keeping these processes together are happy to make some changes.
If anyone wants to educate me about how there are new resources available, or how existing resources can be re-allocated to make some significant progress please feel free to contact me either publicly or privately. I would _love_ to see improvements in all of these areas.
On 07/17/2013 04:29 PM, Mike Milinkovich wrote:
If we’re looking for user feedback, reading the article and comments here[1] would be helpful.
Gathering the feedback and reacting to it based on end-users request is not something Eclipse contributors generally excel at doing. The main entry-point for contributors is Bugzilla, which doesn't reflect the real concerns of most users. I guess having the Foundation gathering such external feedback and create reports per project saying "Here is what people like and didn't like about your project in the last 3 monthes" could help project to identify what is critical for better adoption.
Is this something we could imagine the Foundation to provide ? Does it make sense?