Friday, May 27, 2011

The awesomeness of Eclipse Development Process (part 2)

Chris has asked for "concrete example" showing the real story behind my previous post. My example will be Tycho IP review. (Note: I'm an outsider to the whole process but I'm dealing with a lot of Maven/Eclipse/Tycho issues in Fedora).
Here is the bug with a lot of info in it. And now let's show the amount of changes that happened to Tycho codebase after this bug was open. I'm not sure that all of these changes are thanks to the project moving to Eclipse.org but I'm pretty sure that most of them are provoked by this and commit messages as this one seems to prove me right.
  1. Even the first few comments are showing that with the start of the review licensing has been fixed in a number of places. This might not look important to pure Java guys but issues like that are showstoppers if one wants to use this tool for something shipped with Fedora or Debian (the two distros with biggest influence on Linux developers). Examples here, here, here, here and here.
  2. No more checked binaries in the scm. Examples here and here.
  3. Cleanup dependency chain. The biggest sin of almost every java project! Examples here, here, here and here.
  4. Do not duplicate code/functionality. Examples here, here and here.
Some of the examples are falling in more than one group but they are mentioned in one place only, decide for yourself whether they apply for others too. Also note that these examples are taken only from git log so one may even think that this is just the top of the iceberg or that could have happened without Eclipse being involved at all. But there is evidence that at least few of them are thanks to it.

P.S. Tycho devs - keep up the good work - you have really made a huge change in the Eclipse ecosystem and I really appreciate your efforts. You are just the most recent show case for this post. :)
P.S. 2 If someone tries to say that these problems are only in certain projects I would ask him/her in advance to give us the URL of his project so others can point similar problems. 

We all do these mistakes and that's where we need help of entities like the Eclipse Foundation.


Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone

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