| [tools-pmc] Nexus Project or perhaps hosting micro-projects directly under Tools Project... |
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Tools PMC, I am in the process of resuming work on Nexus Project
proposal and I would like to seek your input. The problem I am trying to solve is how to make Eclipse
Foundation friendlier to very small projects. These “micro-projects”
have two defining attributes: (1) their scope is rather small (most will likely
only support a few committers and in a lot of cases as few as one) and (2)
their scope is general enough to not make a good fit in an existing project. These
projects can be broken up into two broad types: (1) frameworks that can be used
by other Eclipse projects or the broader ecosystem and (2) end-user
functionality (recent examples: image viewer and export editor contents as
HTML). The idea is to create a new project (Nexus) under the Tools
Project to serve as an organizational point for managing these micro-projects.
The Nexus project lead and committers would be responsible for: 1. Maintaining project website with information about how to
go about creating a micro-project. 2. Promoting the idea that it’s now easier to create
small projects (both internally and externally). 3. Serving as first-review filter for incoming project
proposals. One important function would be identifying proposals whose scope
intersects too much with an existing project. 4. Managing org.eclipse.nexus.* namespace under which all
Nexus sub-projects would belong. 5. Monitoring health of existing micro-projects and providing
regular updates to Tools PMC. 6. Any necessary infrastructure (mostly build and
distribution). The goal is to free sub-projects from having to handle this on their
own. It’s likely that most of the needs will be addressed by the new
build service currently being developed at Foundation’s level, in which
case this is a catch-all for any remaining infrastructure work. Some have suggested that we don’t really need a
separate project for this function and that we could ask Tools PMC to accept
and manage such projects directly. I tend to think that this will not scale
effectively if we are successful in attracting large number of micro-projects,
but I’d like to know where Tools PMC members stand on this. Thoughts? Comments? PS: There is an out-of-date wiki page (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Nexus_Project)
that I’ve used in the past to work on this project proposal. It doesn’t
reflect two important changes at the Foundation since the wiki was lasted
updated: (1) it is now possible to create arbitrary levels of project nesting,
so micro-projects can be actual projects rather than components, and (2) there
is an effort under way to provide a ready-to-use build system directly from the
Foundation. - Konstantin
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