Re: [eclipse-dev] Releng retrospective ...

[Krzysztof Daniel <kdaniel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2013-07-18 at 13:26 -0400, David M Williams wrote:
>  I'll set an arbitrary date of  Wednesday 7/24 to get your
> additions/corrections, if any, and then I will remove that "Note" at
> the top of the wiki page. 

Thanks for the great write up. I'd like just to add my 2 cents:
= Meta-comments =
it may  be indeed that only a few people understand how the entire build
works. The point is that everyone is able to build Eclipse by their own,
with nearly no build specific knowledge. So the build is very easy to
consume, which does not imply easy to produce. I personally find the
inhouse build as a potential source of contributions.

= Conclusions =
I find the "without major re-org [...]" assumption being wrong. Maven is
not just a build system, it's an entire philosophy very different from
PDE, and the fee must be paid. It is either re-org of projects or
excessive amount of work to be done in order to fix the gap between
maven and pde. I don't feel in a position to say which is cheaper, but
the reorg is technically right.
However, the hottest pain point is "who" not "how". Reorg can't be done
by releng, as releng don't have write access to the project repos, and
committers are not really eager to change things that just work [1] or
to get write access to releng engineers [2] (no personal offense here,
as there are some committers that do really care). In other words, I
find it a big managerial problem, not a technical one.


[1] Bug 359033 - [Net] Move
fragments /bundles/org.eclipse.core.net/fragments/ to /bundles
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=359033
[2] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse-dev/msg09557.html


-- 
Krzysztof Daniel <kdaniel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Red Hat