My first concern is, probably like many open-source
developers, that the projects I contribute are perene.
I've seen too many (little and big) projects dying, by lack of
interest of the community or by the main developers
themselves.
Well yes, sometimes it's for more basic reasons, developers
also need to eat and earn money, and their job can take all their
time and energy.
Also with time, developers change their occupations to try new
challenges.
If I look at eclipse itself now, I find it myself less "sexy"
than other newer technologies, based on nodejs for example (I was
thinking at Visual Studio Code).
But PDT is a great product and has still a lot of
potential.
PDT is daily used by myself, by my developer colleagues and by
other people I know and they are happy with it.
Like Dawid said, PDT code changed a lot the 5 last years, and
in the right direction.
It's much more stable now that when I started to contribute to
PDT, a lot of work was done by a little team, and Dawid contributed
A LOT, because he has a good global view/skill of the eclipse
plateform.
PDT has a lot of feature and I think it's really worth (at
least for me) to put some of my free time to make it even
better.
But the more I do, the more I see that 2 active developers are
far from being enough for such a big project, for many logical
reasons I won't enumerate here (one being lack of free
time).
If we migrate to github, to have more visibility, we will
maybe be overwhelmed by feature or evolution requests, and maybe
also by bug reports that are already on bugzilla.
So migrating to github? Yes for sure. But without new
developers, I feel it will be a pain with our actual capacities
and it will add an
additional workload.
And that's my real concern about PDT. We have to stay
realistic about our real capacities and reactivity to answer user
requests, or we will generate more frustration and delays. In the
500 opened bugs, there are a lot of enhancement requests, and many
are justified.
For the 4 technical points, I'm agree by removing old stuff
and adopt more adequate technologies, even if we need to rewrite
the PHP model and other things.
We have a lot of code that needs to (or could) be revised to
be more efficient, but with the proposed changes, it's like
developing a new product from the scratch. I feel that many PDT
code parts have reached their technical "limit".
So, what is the best solution? Rewrite big parts one after the
other, probably breaking a lot of things and delaying new PDT
releases?
Or puting actual PDT in maintenance mode and rewriting in
parallel a whole new PDT product?
Keep in mind that we are only 2 developers yet and that Dawid
has a lot more PDT/eclipse technical background then me
😉
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