Re: [eclipse-ide-wg] Eclipse IDE Working Group Minutes - 5th April 2022

[Thomas Mäder <tmader@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

since I recently joined the JDT project as a committer again (after 20 years), I'm taking the liberty of chiming in on the "get more engagement" topic. These remarks apply mostly to the JDT project, but I would suspect they are valid elsewhere, as well. I fully expect this list to ruffle some feathers, but I feel it's important that we understand what it feels like to approach our community from the outside.

1. Committers are not responsive to change requests. 

With the move to Github, the team went through the open change requests on gerrit, and some had not received any attention after 2 years. There are technical and organisational reasons for this, but if that happened to me, it would be my first and last contribution. If we want people to believe their contribution is important, it needs to be important to us.

2. There is generally very little community-oriented communication going on.

Mails to the jdt-dev list elicit sparse responses and channels like mattermost are silent. There is no regular community meeting. Also, it's hard to find out which communication channels apply to the jdt project: jdt-dev is the obvious choice, but you also need platform-dev, eclipse-dev, ide-wg and cross-platform-issues mailing lists to keep up with relevant topics. 

3. The on-boarding doc is terrible.

I can't say it any more kindly, I'm afraid. The first place I got to when googling for guidance was here: https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/eclipse.jdt/developer. Good luck getting from there to a fully functional setup. I had the help of a kindly colleagure (thx, Jeff) to get me started, but as random dude from the internet, I would have turned around and left. Contrast this with something like this: https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/. Fun fact: there is a document that helps you get started at https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui, but if you clone the project and import it into Eclipse, you can't see it, because the git root is not an Eclipse project. 

4. We're not telling a compelling story. 

Mike M. just tweeted a blog saying "Theia is the next generation Eclipse". Why isn't Eclipse the next generation Eclipse? What are our exciting plans for the next 1-3 years? The perception in the general population seems to be that Eclipse is a legacy technology on a downward trend. That may be true or not, but we need a story to counter that perception.

5. High Process

The four release per year mean that a lot of time, the project is in "stabilisation phase" and committers unwilling to make scary changes. All the rules around the release train, M-releases, etc. present a learning curve. I'm sure most of the rules are written down somewhere, but for a newcomer, they are hard to find.

my 0.02. CHF.

/Thomas

------ Original Message ------

From: "Jonah Graham" <jonah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: "Discussions on Eclipse IDE Working Group" <eclipse-ide-wg@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Sent: 19/04/2022 15:46:24

Subject: [eclipse-ide-wg] Eclipse IDE Working Group Minutes - 5th April 2022

Hi all,

Please see the approved minutes from the 5th of March for the Eclipse IDE Working Group, attached.

The Steering Committee unanimously approved the Minutes of April 5th, 2022 on April 19th 2022.

Best Regards,
Jonah.

~~~

Jonah Graham
Kichwa Coders
www.kichwacoders.com