[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Things Committers should know

[Wayne Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On the last call, I asked for feedback on the three "Things..." that 
I've composed. The following two are the ones that I think are most 
complete. I'd love your feedback.

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Links to non-eclipse.org content

Occasionally, you may want or need to provide links to external content 
from your project website. Several projects do this today: it's an 
excellent way to provide more information for your project, and help to 
make your project become part of the community. Some projects link to 
websites that showcase how the project's code is being used by the 
community, some to FAQs and other sources of information.

The content on the Eclipse website and wiki is subject to the Eclipse 
Terms of Use [1]. Information, downloads, and other kinds of information 
found on other websites are likely subject to different terms of use. In 
consideration of this, it is critical that your project's consumers are 
made explicitly aware of where the Eclipse project's website ends and 
the third-party site begins.

You can provide links from your Eclipse project's web site to external 
resources (e.g. binaries, code, etc.), provided that:

  1. There is some adequate disclaimers that make it clear that 
although this is a "related link" that this is not Eclipse content.
  2. The link to the existing code is not just be a direct link to 
content. It has to be a link to a download page on the external site.
  3. The link to their download page needs to be such that it brings up 
an entirely new browser so that it is made even more apparent to the 
user that they are leaving the eclipse.org website.

[1] http://www.eclipse.org//legal/termsofuse.php
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Component == Project

Recent changes to the development process [1] have formalized the notion 
of arbitrarily nested projects, otherwise known as sub-projects. One of 
the implications of this change is that the former notion of a component 
effectively no longer exists. What we formerly referred to as a 
"component" is now just a sub-project. Sub-projects have their own set 
of committers (i.e. the source tree in the project's code repository has 
its own UNIX group describing who has commit privileges), their own 
release schedule, their own website, and more. Creation of a new 
sub-project requires a project proposal, followed by a creation review, 
and project provisioning.

The development process describes a project that itself has no 
sub-projects as an "Operating Project" and states that an Operating 
Project owns and maintains a collection of source code and/or web pages. 
A project that does have sub-projects, is described as a "Container 
Project"; Container Projects may have their own web pages, but do not 
have their own code repository. Effectively, this means that you can 
only have code in the leaf nodes of the project tree.

[1] 
http://www.eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/development_process.php#4_Structure_and_Organization 

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