Skip to main content

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
Re: [platform-dev] Has the time come?

On 18.03.2021 09:51, Mickael Istria wrote:
But I think Oomph cannot be the silver-bullet of attracting new contributors: Oomph is still an Eclipse specific technology and workflow newcomers will need to learn and read about in order to become efficient.

I'm not sure many of us are convinced that GitHub itself is a magic bullet despite anecdotes to the contrary.

The point of Oomph is that it's fully automated, with defaults such that one can just hit next, next, finish.  I don't think it's possible to have fewer manual tasks nor less reading for a motivated but lazy (time-constrained) user:

https://www.eclipse.org/setups/installer/?url=https://git.eclipse.org/c/oomph/org.eclipse.oomph.git/plain/setups/interim/PlatformSDKConfiguration.setup&show=true

The premise that this not a silver-bullet because it is Eclipse-specific is questionable at best.  Surely no one will be contributing to any part of the platform without using Eclipse, or am I missing something?

My sense continues to be that the platform team's own "not invented here, or not invented by us" aversion is the primary problem of a missed opportunity here.  Folks just don't feel a need or desire to promote something that's simple and works well, nor to contribute to improvements if it doesn't 100% suit the ideals.  Instead I see notes about "one click cloning a repo" being really cool when we have "one click provision an entirely functional IDE  ready for contribution" already available for a long time.  Why is that I wonder?

Oomph is to provisioning what Gerrit is to Code Review: maybe the best tool around, but that almost know one beyond a few dozen of people who've been working on Eclipse stuff for years will care to learn.

What's to learn?  Most users are already familiar with using it via the installer.  In any case, by implication, apparently what people really care to do is learn how to install and then use Eclipse (the right one with PDE) as well as EGit to clone the correct URLs.  Then they know to magically import the correct and only appropriate projects into the workspace from that clone, without reading anything.   Then these highly motivated users know to set up a  proper API baseline from their ethereal knowledge. When faced with the sea of red errors, they continue to try to figure out (without reading anything), how to make them go away before they can make their first attempt at a contribution.  (Oh yes, and don't forget to copy/renamed the SWT .classpath file manually, without having read something to describe that tiny but fundamental step.)

This whole premise seems beyond questionable to me.   Instead, let's focus on moving to GitHub as a magic bullet, with no technical discussion about the merit of that because it's a social decision not a technical decision and the conclusion is foregone...




Back to the top