Hey everyone,
Migration to Github is almost done and this led to a number of various and very welcome discussions about where and how the project is going - Thanks for that it's more than welcome!
As we are all opinionated, work under different circumstances, environments etc. the discussions could get heated which IMHO is a recipe for disaster. What we all want is for Eclipse IDE to excel. So here is a request - Please state your opinion considering how it will be received.
There is no way that every decision will be such that every committer is happy with it - simply impossible.
Everyone has to learn to accept that no matter how much he/she disagrees with something if the majority of the committers think this is the right thing to do, it's almost certain this is the right thing to do. Even if it happens to be a wrong step technically, technical stuff is fixable but division in the community is most often not.
I look for as democratic process as possible which means we are all equal during discussions and voting. The vote of a PMC member, PL and committer do not differ and one doesn't have more weight than the other. It doesn't matter which company we work ( Red Hat, IBM, Advantest, Microsoft, SAP - sorry for not listing everyone from
https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/eclipse/who) when it comes to vote each of us has a single vote and its weight is independent of the company he/she works for.
One may ask why we have PMC/PLs in this case at all - being in such a position doesn't give any of us more power but rather more duties. E.g. knowing a bit earlier about some upcoming changes outside of project control, trying to figure how that would affect the project in the long term, etc. But at the end of the day all such decisions are taken and shared by/with the committers.
Let's use the Github migration as an example. The project clearly had a choice between Gitlab and Github only. An initial document/proposal about migration was created and shared with committers (to the extent possible for the PMC in this case) - up from that point it's up to committers to step up and extend it if they think more is needed. There is no way someone does all the work and comes with perfect strategy/plan/implementation ahead of time - unfortunately we no longer live in these times and don't have that luxury. If you ask me if I think these changes are beneficial I would say "Yes, 100%" but it has never been my dream job to do that tedious work.
Please keep the discussions ongoing and to the point so we can act on them together and come to a state where we have less of polarized opinions.
--
Aleksandar Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse Team
