| Re: [eclipse.org-planning-council] A suggested topic for PlanningCouncil Discussion |
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Hi Ed, Ed Merks wrote: Dave, This is an excellent summary of the issue that lies beneath this week's confusion of ideas. From the perspective you've outlined, the release train simply delivers the raw materials and a commercial vendor would refine these to assemble their products. Eclipse's packaging efforts are the open source equivalent of such a refinement process. In both cases, having a train well stocked with a wealth of commodities provides the raw materials to drive the effort. Of course a carload of steel will be of more value than a carload of iron ore, so there will be and should be pressure on the level of refinement in the train itself, but we have to recognize that the train itself might not deliver a fully manufactured car and that perhaps this should not even be its purpose. After all, high quality steel and component parts is what the car manufactures need to assemble their cars, so to me that's what the focus of the train should be. To abuse this metaphor a little: why wouldn't/shouldn't the train be focused on the needs of the consumers (car buyers) as much as or more than the car manufacturers? I know and appreciate that the car manufacturers have a certain set of needs here, and that those are important to the community. I'm not trying to minimize those needs. But it seems to me that there are other important community needs here too...e.g. consumer needs to have new stuff as part of Eclipse (innovation), simple end-user install/upgrade, all projects need exposure/distribution in order to succeed...particularly relatively new areas (e.g. RCP), and others. Scott Certainly from a modeling perspective, Rich and I are very keen on producing a Modeling package from the Ganymede component parts. This is badly needed by those in modeling community who are currently served a confusing bucket of nuts and bolts; they've told us this a great many times. It's important to note that many of these nuts and bolts are incubating projects, so I would be extremely unhappy if those projects are not allowed on the Ganymede train. I will continue to question efforts in that direction and I will feel compelled to remind people the extent to which the Ganymede train relies on locomotives like EMF to make it work. I'll be more than happy to follow the collectively agreed to must do's for Europa, but if those must do's start to take the form of exclusionary tactics, I'll reconsider whether the goodwill demonstrated by following the collective rules is being rewarded in a way that benefits the users who want to see an integrated Modeling package. I do expect to set a high bar for what goes in the Modeling package and I expect to test it well. I also expect folks who want to ship in the Modeling package to help define those rules and most importantly to follow them. I don't see the Planning Council's place right now to be setting those rules for all of us at the level of the train. I can imagine over the years that the experience from these packaging efforts will feed back into rules that produce more refined results for the train over all, but I think it's premature to do that now. I'll balance my comments above by saying that I can also see value in taking all of Ganymede and producing one giant package or equivalently sucking in the entire population of features from the update manager, not for the purpose of redistribution, but for the purpose of testing. The question is, who will do that testing? Will there be a community interested in this? I'm quite sure that such a result does not have value to the Modeling community, nor likely to any specific community, so I'm not sure my efforts toward producing a Modeling package will be well served by testing the complete mishmash. If others will step up, I will consider doing my part. In the end, while I understand the desire to reduce the mishmash train down to something we might call a product, I'm not convinced that effort isn't somewhat misguided or misplaced. I'm sure another round of debate will involve what packages are "special" and hence which packages will get to be on the main download page. My sense right now is that we have four flavours of vanilla: plain, classic, French, and natural honey. Of course some will argue that having one hundred and one flavors will make choosing too difficult. After all, it's already difficult to choose from the four flavors of vanilla. So even the solution of providing integrated packages also leads to new problems... Ed Merks/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA mailto: merks@xxxxxxxxxx 905-413-3265 (t/l 313) Dave Steinberg/Toronto /IBM@IBMCA To Sent by: eclipse.org-planning-council@eclips eclipse.org-plann e.org ing-council-bounc cc es@xxxxxxxxxxx Subject Re: [eclipse.org-planning-council] 11/03/2007 07:06 A suggested topic for PM PlanningCouncil Discussion Please respond to "eclipse.org-plan ning-council" <eclipse.org-plan ning-council@ecli pse.org> To me, the hard problem is *how* do you create a unified whole out of a mish-mash of projects? It's certainly easier to do with fewer projects than the number currently planning to go into Ganymede. But are we honestly going to be able to come up with a good set of criteria for inclusion, much less a way to fairly apply that criteria? And can we possibly achieve that without creating major ill will? If we wanted to follow the example of Linux distributions, they definitely don't do it that way. A distribution is produced by a whole other set of people that define their criteria and do the packaging, integration testing, upstream bug reporting and even, where necessary, fix problems locally. They get to make the decisions because they do the legwork. And, of course, it behooves the projects to help them out because they're the channel to the users. I would think that the parallel would be to use the output of Ganymede as input into an integration/packaging effort. Are there any interests in the Eclipse community who would step up and do this kind of work? Cheers, Dave -- Dave Steinberg Rational Software - IBM Toronto Lab mailto:davidms@xxxxxxxxxx Nick Boldt wrote on 11/02/2007 11:31:07 PM:So, then, you're for the idea of merit-based tiers? Something akin to package repos like main, restricted, universe, multiverse, testing, stable, etc. Seems entirely reasonable, IMHO, especially if we don't call them "Hi Fi" and "Simultaneous" [1], but rather "main" and "multiverse". [1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Ganymede#Two_Classes_of_Participation Nick _______________________________________________ eclipse.org-planning-council mailing list eclipse.org-planning-council@xxxxxxxxxxx https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse.org-planning-council_______________________________________________ eclipse.org-planning-council mailing list eclipse.org-planning-council@xxxxxxxxxxx https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse.org-planning-council _______________________________________________ eclipse.org-planning-council mailing list eclipse.org-planning-council@xxxxxxxxxxx https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse.org-planning-council |