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Re: [platform-dev] Has the time come?
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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...