There
is a bit of a problem in this approach to capturing the
details of what’s in Luna. It works well for projects that
do one major release a year, aligned with simrel cycles, but
poorly for projects that ship more frequently.
Arguably,
this page is trying to present the delta since Kepler SR2.
To do that, it needs to display summaries of all releases
between what is contributed to Kepler SR2 and what is
contributed to Luna, instead of just the last one.
The
length of release cycles also has an effect on the quality
of the description of the release contributed directly to
Luna. A project that started this release back in June
should be able to write a decent description. A project that
just started a release (we are still four months away from
Luna GA) may not be able to write something particularly
specific just yet, but it would have good details in release
descriptions of preceding releases.
-
Konstantin
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
