Greetings most revered Technology PMC members,
I'd like to draw your attention to the Nexus Project proposal [1]. The
Nexus project is conceived as a home for so-called "micro" projects
that are too small to be projects in their own right. I think there
are a lot of good ideas in the proposal that we should consider.
My first thought when I read this is that I'm not sure that I can
think of a project that's too small to be a project. It's true that
there is a lot of overhead to being an Eclipse project. That said, I
think that there is a lot that we can do to reduce the overhead. We
can, for example, build a proposal template to make it easier to
propose new projects, be more proactive in finding mentors for the
projects, encourage projects to go right to the wiki rather than
fiddle with PHP, and maybe even assemble a package to help new
committers understand things like the IP process. That last part was
the focus of some discussion on the last Architecture Council call, so
we'll likely get some help there.
As an aside, I've been having similar thoughts about the SOC project.
Project longevity is certainly something that we need to work out. The
proposal suggests that Nexus should eventually become a top-level
project. Without something like Nexus, the proposed micro projects
would be required to find a more permanent home as they reach a state
of maturity. I'm not sure how big a problem this is, but it is worth
some consideration.
There's a lot more to discuss; I'd like to hear your initial thoughts.
I'd also like to go through a mental exercise with the Potential
Initial Projects listed at the bottom to see how they would live and
mature (a) under the Nexus project, or (b) without something like the
Nexus project.
Thanks,
Wayne
[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Nexus_Project
