If your project is participating in Luna, you need to read this
note and react accordingly.
Shortly after EclipseCon, Ian will come to me to talk about the
exciting new features in Luna that we need to include on the
website, in marketing materials, or as talking points when
describing the release to the press. In the past, I have tried
to--from memory--recount some of new things I remember from chatter
on project mailing lists or from release review materials.
With the new Project Management Infrastructure (PMI), we have the
opportunity to do better. The review materials are works-in-progress
that have the potential to contain at least partial information now.
Projects should already have plan information captured for the
release. Minimally, they should have decent description of what's
new and exciting in the release.
Take a look at this page that summarizes the release descriptions
for Luna:
https://projects.eclipse.org/releases/luna/details
Frankly, very few of the descriptions are actually useful. The
"description" needs to describe the release. Describing the release
as "the thing we're doing for Luna" isn't useful.
This is an opportunity to draw attention to your project. An
opportunity to attract users, adopters, contributions, and
committers. An opportunity to grow your project's diversity.
Besides, you need to do this eventually anyway as part of your
release review.
Unless these descriptions are improved, I'll be hard pressed to tell
Ian anything when he asks.
Here are some examples of some descriptions that I consider
reasonable:
--
ATL - A Model Transformation Technology 3.5.0
This release contains no particular enhancements. It fixes some
minor issues and ensures compatibility with Eclipse Luna.
Code Recommenders 2.1.0
This release integrates the Snipmatch code snippet search engine. It
furthermore adds the ability to easily contribute new snippets to a
shared repository. Under the hood, the performance of loading
recommendation models has been greatly improved.
EMF Compare 3.0.0
The main focus of the EMF Compare 3.0 release will be to complete
the integration with Team and the various repository providers
(EGit, Subversive, CVS, ...). Other themes include an overhaul of
the user interface and further improvements of the matching engines,
most notably on the content matching strategy.
Equinox 4.4.0
The Equinox 4.4 release will continue to focus on implementing the
latest Core OSGi specification and selected OSGi Compendium
services. The next OSGi specification (Release 6) is finalizing in
March 2014. The Equinox 4.4 release includes a full implementation
of the R6 Core Framework as well as several compendium service
implementations. Many of the Equinox specification implementations
from this release are used as the Reference Implementations for the
OSGi R6 specification.
Dynamic Languages Toolkit 5.1.0
The DLTK 5.1 release will be primarily focused on bug fixes.
--
There's still some room for improvement. Some of these give me cause
to look a little harder at the plans to see if there are any hidden
gems, but there are few obvious new features or improvements that
are worthy of being highlighted in press materials.
I'll refrain for the moment from giving counter examples.
Don't describe the document. Don't describe the project. Describe
the release.
If you have questions, or need assistance, I'm here to help.
Wayne
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