On
24.09.2019 17:16, Mikaël Barbero wrote:
I fully agree that the removal of the
planning council from the Bylaws will help
clarifying the Eclipse Foundation position.
As this is a time for a change, what about
transferring all the resources associated with
the planning council to an actual Eclipse
project or a Working Group?
Working
Groups are rather heavy weight for such a
thing. It's not as if there will be a budget to
be allocated or that anyone will pay fees to be
a member of such a group.
I tend to agree in the current state. I just want
to leave the door open in case some organizations
think it would be better to have a "management"
structure on top of the IDE building/packaging
effort.
Currently, simrel's resources (git repos,
Jenkins instance, etc.) are somewhat owned by
the planning council but there is no tangible
Eclipse project associated with those
resources.
Well,
in the end the planning council mostly manages
SimRel and we already have a SimRel project of
some sort:
https://git.eclipse.org/c/simrel/
So
I think a "project" kind of already exists...
That's a git repository without a backing Eclipse
Project. Some people have write permissions on it,
but it's currently done without following the
Eclipse Development Process. The list of people with
write permission is managed by the webmasters, but
it should be something public like for any other
project. Also, having a project would let us benefit
from the tooling to identify inactive committers and
be able to do some cleanup.
Likewise, the planning council membership
is currently defined in the Bylaws, but when
it will be removed, I guess there will be no
more record of it. IMHO, it is desirable to
clarify those points before the bylaws get
changed to have a clear message to give to the
community.
Yes,
that's a good point. Although I tend to think
that anyone who wants to be involved should be
able to do so. I.e., do we really actually need
a formal definition?
IMHO, we should follow the same rules (ie the
EDP) as for any other repo/project hosted by the
Foundation? With the planning council special
status, we could somewhat justify those resources
being outside of any project. Not anymore.
Is a project enough? Should this project be
part of a larger initiative like a working
group?
I'd
say no, that's just too heavy weight...
Understood. Let's hear what other have to say
about it.
I would say that from a day to day
operational point of view, we need at least a
project whose committers are the planning
council members.
I
would wonder how that will be different from the
committers for the simrel repo; those are the
people doing the real/actual work after all. :-P
Well, we could imagine that projects
participating to the simrel don't have write
permissions anymore and only contribute their
changes via gerrit patches. But it could also be the
same set of committers as today.
It could be a brand new project or we could
merge the simrel effort into EPP and make it
the central project for the Eclipse IDEs
distributions. Again from an operational point
of view, simrel and epp have been working so
closely for so many years that I think it
makes sense to have the resources of both
getting even closer.
WDYT?
In
general much of this is a cat herding exercise.
I'm not sure the cats will be more inclined to
be less unruly by virtue of project
reorganization. Also, reorganizing existing
infrastructure is work and therefore has a
cost. Who will do that and will the benefits
justify the overhead?
I agree this is cat herding *if* everything can
stay the same with the removal of the Planning
Council from the Bylaws. IMHO, it cannot. The
Foundation should not host a git repo with code
outside of any actual project. I'm proposing to move
everything to EPP to avoid the project creation
steps and other tedious tasks and as I already
mentioned because the effort of both simrel and epp
are very close.
The benefit is to be more open and transparent:
we get a project like any other that does *an*
aggregation of projects, with its own rules, with a
clear list of contributors, actual landing pages for
the project... Maybe, tomorrow, another project will
want to do something similar but with other rules,
other projects etc... Everybody is treated equally.
I
think the general goal should be to make things
as simple as possible so as to run more
smoothly. Also, to my thinking, anyone who
wants to be helpful with regard to streamlining
the simultaneous release process should be
welcomed with open arms.
I agree and I don't think that I'm proposing
anything going against being welcoming to anyone who
want to help. The raison d'être of the EDP (and to
have a project following it) is to be more open and
transparent.