This page contains an archive of Eclipse/PMC meeting minutes for 2009.

Meeting Minutes

Dec 9: - John, Dani, McQ, Martin

Agree on the Eclipse/API Central/Deprecation Policy

Dec 2: - John, Dani, McQ

Some discussion about getting good talk coverage at EclipseCon
Need to revisit API deprecation policy when we have enough attendees

Nov 25: - John, Dani, McQ

No interesting discussion due to lack of attendees

Nov 18: - John, Martin, Dani

John: Deadlocks / errors during JDT and CVS tests - deadlocks should be fixed, not sure about other failures.

Nov 11: - Dani, Martin, John, Jeff

Nothing to discuss.

Nov 4: - Dani, Martin

Discussed speeding up builds along the lines of bug 293830.

Oct 28: - McQ, Dani, Martin, John

McQ - vacation for 2 weeks: Dani to do the calls, John to do the status messages
McQ, Dani - IntelliJ gone open source; but not making the J2EE part open source; GUI designer and XML tooling is open source; JUnit and TestNG integration; svn integration out of the box
- Seems to be a very liberal license - pulling in the UI designer into the Eclipse world might be an option
- We need more information
- Pre-integration of stuff: Could we have a "Get more stuff into Eclipse" menu item that auomatically grabs the popular stuff, rather than offering the more complex repo choices we have today
  - Or, lazy loading: E.g. click on a docs stub, open a dialog to install the docs
  - Address the casual end users like "Hey I just want to edit some XML"
- Martin: This is the "product" vs "framework" discussion which has come up before
- McQ: perhaps it is just a question of level of indirection?
- Martin: Yes but who is going to actually put resources on that?
- McQ: must have a solution in the base (the Platform)
- Martin: That would be great, then we can approach the AC with a much stronger background
- McQ: want to be competitive. Will know more about resourcing by Nov 16.
- John: Already have a plan for some groundwork for this in 3.6. Some Mylyn solution exists on top of p2.
- AI Martin put the item on the AC agenda
Martin - Follow up on Oct 14 McQ Official Eclipse Platform Deprecation Policy
- John - Concerned about putting semantics on "Marketing numbers" for the releases. Focus on the time ("2 years") rather than releases.
- John - What about upstream projects? E.g. ECF had a major release
  - McQ - cannot make decisions for other projects. If I can only move when everyone else moves, we get a deadlock. Would like to only commit to version ranges that are re-exported
- AI continue discussion on the mailing list

Oct 21: - McQ, John, Dani, Martin, Jeff

McQ - backward compatibility: struggling more with maintaining backward compatibility than hoped
- 12000 references to "internal" in IBM products (RAD) according to API - mostly due to verbatim copies of Platform code, will need better API tooling to get rid of these false positives -- e.g. by grouping together by "copied package"
- IBM may need to keep the shape of internals alive when refactoring code
- Keep 3.x in place as is. Do any larger API changes in e4.
- Jeff - consumers need to understand that there is a lot of work being put into API, and it requires consumer's feedback / interaction
- If non-IBM committers need to break internals, they are allowed to do so. If IBM people need the internals, they will invest time to work around that again.
Jeff - retention policies in the Galileo Repo
- Just keep on everybody's radar. Getting this right is VERY important for the entire community.
- We got some good stories in p2, but these don't mesh very well with mirroring (unless the entire repo is mirrored)
- Martin - discussions in last EAC call: Maven has long history of keeping old versions alive, Andrew Overholt mentioned that making access to old versions too easy may also be a problem

Oct 14: - McQ, Dani, Martin

Dani Nightly Builds: More builds broken. Need to take more care for the builds.
Martin e4 and the AC: AC wants monthly e4 updates; Question about 4 competing declarative UI technologies
- The switch between being in the "incubator" and being the "Eclipse SDK" needs to be "what are we using ourselves"?
- Until we use e4 ourselves to develop, it's going to remain in the incubator. At the time we switch over, there will be one or more winning technologies.
- McQ to join AC calls, Martin to remind timely.
Martin AC - API Deprecation Policy should be published, projects want to follow the Platform lead. AI McQ write something down

Oct 7: - John, Dani, Martin, Jeff

Martin: How to run the performance tests
- John: See web doc
- Dani: Frederic working on a tool for displaying results, he's still the man to ask in case of questions.

Sep 30: -

Sep 24: -

Sep 17: - McQ, Dani, Martin, John

John: CQ Process - The PMC's +1 is not for reading the code but for verifying that "we want this" on a high level. Bring dubious ones to the PMC as a group.
McQ: Java 5 - there are few plugins which may want an earlier Execution Environment, but it makes sense to drop the 1.4 Reference Platforms (need to communicate this to IBM).
John: Component Milestone Plans - bring up in the arch call
Martin: AC Representation - McQ to lead, John to second
Getting ready for M2, signing off for 3.5.1

Sep 10: - McQ, John, Jeff

Java 5
Jeff: Apache Aerius
e4 progress

Sep 3: - McQ, Dani, Martin, John

John: New 3.6 plan - consider removing 1.4 as reference platform, talk to Runtime guys at IBM
Dani: Doc Features

Aug 26: - McQ, Dani, Martin, Jeff

New Sat4j version - RT PMC decided to take it out again, so not an issue
Separating docs from the code? - Dani to post respective bug on the pmc mailing list
e4 status updates - Jeff interested in regular e4 updates on the pmc

Aug 19: - McQ, Dani, Martin, Jeff, John A

Pruning inactive committers
- Martin: The EMO recommends removing inactive committers in order to keep the project vibrant and relevant. Why are there so many non-voters?
  - Dani: Component Granularity - Portal is still broken for JDT UI vs. JDT Core.
  - Martin: Yet there are likely some who really haven't been active for long -- but only component / project lead would know that
- McQ: We are not actively searching to prune inactive committers. Committers are good, whether active or not. No interest in doing any work for this, but OK if others do.
  - Jeff: sees some sense in pruning the list, and did so in the past for Equinox
- Rights - what can we actually do in the Portal?
  - Component leads can mark people active who appear inactive on the portal
  - Only The Project Lead can decommitterize, and can do so without PMC interaction
    - Jeff - it's odd that this is not symmetrical to approving new committers
- John: Once a committer is emeritus and decides to come back, can we make the process of re-making them a committer easier?
  - Jeff thinks that the normal committer process is good in this case.
- Consensus:
  - We do not actively ask to remove inactive committers, but if a component / project lead wants to do so, they are welcome
  - The process is to first send E-Mail to the potentially inactive committer and if they agree they are decommitterized and optionally turned to committer emeritus
  - If the E-Mail doesn't work any more they can also be decommitterized immediately.
Reference Platforms
- Going through the process of refreshing reference platform list for Helios
- Currently considering: Switch to SLES 11 from SLES 10, add Windows 7, add Ubuntu LTS 9.04, add 64-bit Eclipse for Linux PPC-64 (possibly replacing 32-bit Eclipse for Linux PPC-64)
- If you have additional platforms or upgrades to consider, send a note on eclipse-pmc or mention during a PMC call
Bugzilla: LATER / REMIND states
- 4000 bugs affected. Need to discuss in the arch call how to proceed.
- Dani Proposal: LATER --> WONTFIX / REMIND --> INVALID / and move back to the inbox since often assignees no longer active

Aug 12: - McQ, Dani, Martin, Jeff, John A

Retrospective Actions -
- Need to nominate a person to care for performance: Dani to try find somebody from JDT core for a bounded time (6 months or so)
- Build issues
- Bugzilla performance etc
Backward compatibility
- Reporting tool - want a foundation database, that Members can report their API / non-API usage signatures into
- Part of the member value-add
- KNOWING the impact is the first important thing
Forward compatibility - from RT / Christian Campo
- PDE never tried to ensure that somebody can use 3.4 to launch 3.5
- The differences in launching 3.4 vs 3.5 are small... if we would have been aware, we could have made this possible

Aug 5: - McQ, Dani, Martin, Jeff, John A

Security proposal on eclipse-pmc list - agree that this should be closer to the target runtimes (wtp, ...)
"Plugin" vs "Bundle" - Clarification: Proposal was only about PDE. Global replacement is out of reach.
- McQ thinks that Plugin is a Bundle that makes use of the Eclipse extension registry (plugin.xml) - Jeff disagrees wrt declarative services
- As a message to end users, does it help us if we talk about "plugins"?
- Is this an internal statement about tooling, or something we should do more globally?
- Real problem is, that people should perceive PDE as tooling for bundles: Make Eclipse more adoptable in the OSGi community
- "Bundle" and "Plugin" have been used interchangeably for about 5 years... but still, a more pervasive change would require lots of docs changes that may be very painful for consumers
- McQ wants a technical proposal what should be changed
- Perhaps provide a separate tooling for bundles (with property files replaced)? EPP Package for Bundle Developers? - But a choice is not a good thing...
- Jeff suggestion: Do PDE 3.6 that is "all bundles" plus add a compatibility bundle that gives you the word "plugin" back.
McQ: Backward Compatibility - consuming new versions of Eclipse is still too hard. IBM makes it the highest priority that everything that ran on 3.5 also runs on 3.6 - including internals - or the new version may not be consumable!
- Do anything that may not be easily backwards compatible in the 4.0 stream rather than the 3.x stream.
- Jeff thinks this is going to be a hard sell because internals are made to be internal
- Jeff: API Tooling that allows people to discover use of internals, see also bug 261544

Jul 29: - McQ, Dani, Martin, John A, Jeff

Dani will start to organize Eclipse/Galileo/Retrospective items
Too many broken builds recently
e4 shipping 0.9 this week
PDE project proposal coming to explore Eclipse build technology

Jul 15: - McQ, Dani, Martin, John A, Jeff

Dani: What to do with the Galileo Retrospective items? Which ones should become action items? E.g. Bugzilla Slowness?
- John: Next PC meeting is Aug 3, should have items for the PC ready by then
- Decision: PMC mailing list conversation, will review retrospective action in Jul 29 PMC meeting.
McQ to send out a note to formalize John as the PC representation
McQ wants status messages again for the arch call

Jun 24: - McQ, Dani

Dani asked whether the PMC meeting notes are targeted for the public
- McQ: yes, they got announced on pmc mailing list
no PMC call next week due to a holiday

Jun 17: - McQ, Dani, Jeff, John A, (Martin joined just as we were hanging up)

Dani asked whether the PMC had internal discussion of new committer votes
- A: Generally the PMC member for the component gives +1, unless they feel the need to bring the discussion to the rest of the PMC
Jeff mentioned that we should remind the teams to do retrospectives

Jun 10: - McQ, Martin, Dani, Steve, John A

Welcome to Dani, John agrees to be here as a listening member for a while
Sun Java 6u14 (May 25) broken for debugging because thread ID's are changed when garbage collector runs
- Clearly a Sun bug (also happens in jdb) but not yet confirmed by Sun
- Described in Readme, but readme will only be available when a rebuild occurs
- Dani will send out a note tomorrow when they know more about other platforms

Jun 3: - McQ, Martin, Steve, Jeff

McQ - asking Dani M to join the Eclipse PMC to represent JDT. PMC agrees. McQ will send a note to Mike Milinkovich / EMO.
McQ - asking John A to represent the Eclipse Project on Planning Council
- Jeff thinks that the PC rep should be a PMC member in order to have a strong bi-directional communication path.
- McQ proposes asking John to join the PMC calls for communication.
- Martin agrees provided that John is OK with this delegate role.
Steve bug 277713 critical bug, probably more critical bugs to triage - defer to arch call
Jeff Target Provisioning discussion

May 27: - McQ, Martin, Steve

bug 277735 releng.tools copyright tool - Martin would like to see it released. Discuss in Arch call.

May 20: - McQ, Martin

PC Lead: John A suggested to represent Eclipse
Linux: New Launchers built, didn't start on Linux ... I-build was broken, want to know why

May 13: - McQ, Martin, Jeff, Steve, Philippe

bug 273660 Common Navigator: Pipelining issues with JDT + CDT

May 6: - McQ, Martin, Jeff

McQ PDE Feature Request
- New Target Platform came in late
- PMC agrees with trying to fix this, but want to see the final patch before +1
McQ Testplan
- People going to test their own because test plan is too complex
Jeff Splash Screen

Apr 29: - McQ, Martin, Steve

Martin: Java6 ref platform - anything between 6u3 and 6u10 (exclusive) was broken, anything after 6u10 (inclusive) has license issues in thirdpartylicensereadme.txt.
- Suggestion: Dont update the plan document yet, but start running tests with 6u13 on Linux. AI McQ talk to Kim about this.
- AI Martin make a final attempt to get more info out of Sun.
Steve: Solaris x86 - looks good but some problems with X server
McQ: API Deprecation Policy bug 261544 - AI McQ synthesise some summary and comment on the bug
M7: Testers found some interesting prolbems with launching Eclipse from Eclipse (depending on VM, BIDI chars in paths dont work)

Apr 22: - McQ, Martin, Steve, Philippe

Steve: Solaris x86 - got a Browser running, looking good,
Steve: Cocoa Sheets - new API - Dialogs associated with a Window: Dialog slides down from title bar
- Clients need to opt in through new API because they need to specify a dialog as being adequate for sheet support
Martin: Maintenance builds post SR2
- experience in the past has shown only very few, surgically isolated patches so the problem is probably smaller than anticipated
- don't want anything produced to appear official -- anything that appears official MUST result in a test pass and this must be avoided
- it makes sense to talk about this in the context of "Release Train" and not only "Eclipse Platform" -- Martin filed bug 273262 against the AC
Martin has some update on Sun Java 6 -- will update bug 261724

Apr 15: - McQ, Jeff, Martin, Steve

McQ: Solaris x86 - OK if we get the machine up and running until Friday, too late for swapping reference platform otherways
Polish List Polish3.5 - Some developers don't have time for polish items. For now, it's just a list such that we *know* what's coming up.
- Martin wondering why we need a separate wiki page, bugzilla query should be enough?
- Who owns the Polish list - Eclipse Project Committers. We capture items that we find "stupid" when using Eclipse ourselves.
Maintenance builds after 3.4
- IBM will never consume any community builds: want the absolute minimum of required fixes
- If a fix shows up in any IBM product, then it is on a bug somewhere
- But fixes are never cumulative
- Martin thinks that a first step would be well-defined markup of such "released-to-product" fixes.
- Another next step is allowing Eclipse builds by the Community -- we can do anything that's not making Kim's life harder.
- How to proceed with communications: open bugs, bugzilla discussions.

Apr 1: - McQ, Jeff, Martin, Steve, Philippe

McQ: Solaris x86 (recommend building since Sun helped at Eclipsecon), Perf results (not trustworthy on Windows?)
Martin: M-builds beyond 3.4.2
- Two problems: (a) provide a build system that the community can use, and (b) provide a platform for accumulating fixes easily without risking version collisions etc
  - The risk of (b) is high that as a result we'd have some low-quality sea of incompatible fixes. We better don't go with this.
- Other solution is allow to cherry-pick on source level - just provide a new target milestone in bugzilla, product builders cherry-pick patches they want to apply and do so locally.
Jeff: OSGi tooling; future plans around build
- We need to run builds ourselves (see also above) - e.g. equinox sdk feature is in some internal repository
- PDE build has stretched pretty far over time.. what to do with it
  - Needs to be one of the main plan items for 3.6, but don't want to wait that long
  - SAP perhaps to help out with staffing
Boris to host the arch call since Steve, McQ, Philippe all cannot join

Mar 18: - McQ, Steve, Martin

no arch next week due to EclipseCon
McQ found a performance test that is 8000% slower
- teams are overwhelmed (but remind them to check performance tests)
Martin reminded us about use of Parallel IP for Mature Projects and JSch-0.1.41
- need to identify uses on the download links (or also inside the downloads?)
- EMO has not developed the policy yet
- McQ: "Q: Should we just not use the mechanism?"
- Downstream consumers may need to test against new lib features early. Just for test and experimentation, not for consumption: want parallel IP in I-builds
- McQ: Milestones are a corner case -- some consumers use these in products!
- Parallel IP is a tool for projects who want it. A clear policy is one thing. Guidelines for projects to adopt it or not is another thing -- may depend on the number and kind of consumers.
- Result: Martin to Bring up that topic on the Architecture Council/Meetings/March 22 F2F EclipseCon 2009,
  - Example issues: can't put it in for I-build and remove for Milestone S-build

Mar 11: - McQ, Steve, Jeff, Martin

Martin - bug 227055 and late API additions
- McQ: after m6 is too late if it has any downstream impact (changing behavior, deleting things, ...). Plain API additions may slip a week.
- Steve: If new API has effect on performance and polish, may look more favorably.
- If going in after M6, it needs to go through the process (e-mail and public discussion on eclipse-pmc list).
- Strict API Tooling checks to be enabled next week
McQ - state of M6; some late UI things to review
- Some low-risk polish Cocoa items for Eclipsecon (enablers)
- Still changes in p2 (after m6), but stabilizing
Martin/Jeff - New Target Platform Page may require more tweaking - risk of breaking community workflows!
- E.g. adding a directory to the target platform; Jeff uses target platforms a lot, so he's likely more exposed than most of the Community... 10 to 15 locations with hundreds of bundles...
- Related to the bug 224145 p2 "extension location" problem which broke user workflows. Don't want to have such breakage again.
Jeff - Status on Galileo Must do's - deferred to next week
McQ - p2 OSGi OBR Repositories
- Jeff: OSGi wants to foster bundle store / bundle repositories, and specify a repository standard (long-standing RFE112 never been ratified)
- Similar to p2, but does have some potential issues
- Ideally, Equinox would be the reference impl of whatever standard comes up... but got a staffing problem, how to get the solution standardized that we need.
  - Writing a p2 OBR repository adapter is not hard, but OBR repos won't be able to eat p2 metadata
- p2 doesn't care about XML format whereas OBR specifies the XML. p2 got more sophisticated API model. Jeff doesn't have access to the latest spec.
Steve wants Eclipsecon demos to be done on Cocoa, will expedite any bugfixes (please do file them!). Jeff needs browser integration.

Mar 4: - McQ, Steve, Jeff, Philippe, Martin

Upgrade 3.4 -> 3.5
- Will we be able to support this in p2?
  - Nope, needed hooks already in previous release (ie. needed them in 3.4 to be used by 3.5)
- Problems include replacing the Eclipse .exe
- Is this an important use case? There is no band width to solve this problem in 3.5
- it's a good showcase for p2 technology
- idea: put in the low level hooks for 3.5.1 and use them next time (ie. 3.5 -> 3.6)
- Did Update Manager ever do this?
  - Jeff: It does not

Deprecating Mac carbon?
- Apple claims Cocoa is the future
- 3.5 will be the last version of Eclipse where Carbon is under active development
  - But will maintain for 3.6 and 3.7
- Q: Has Apple officially deprecated carbon?
  - No but they have down played it (ie. no 64-bit support for carbon)
- Should there be an official deprecation policy for platforms?

Feb 25: - McQ, Steve, Martin, Philippe

AC "committers should know" mail
- Following external links McQ why not introduce some Javascript on the server that warns users automatically when they follow an external link?
- Components to projects flattening (not on our plate at the time)
Steve Target milestones for Eclipse project
BZ patches to be flagged when they contain API
N-builds broken over the weekend (again) - 3 weekends in a row - no people currently who are willing to work during the weekend
- Hudson might help eventually, for now using e4 builds as the guinea pig
UI Forms has no committers - opportunity for Community to become committer
- migrate off (using internal browser instead)
- no critical bugs, less than 125 interesting bugs
- long-term future is e4 with css/styling and declarative ui
Performance: No news (not yet while closing down API)
- Philippe thinks that the performance milestone must be earlier since performance might touch on API. We're losing memory because rebasing
- McQ - this cycle we had a performance run in M2, this year we're in a better position than last year

Feb 18: - no meeting

Feb 11:

Feb 4:

Jan 28:

Java 6
- move reference platform to Sun 6u11
  - problem(?): Sun added 3 new items added that are licensed LGPL or GPL
  - Martin added comment to bug 261724 to identify this issue
ICU 4.0
- we will stay with 4.0
Deprecation Policy
- still under discussion, bug 261544
Use of internal provisional
- seems to be some consensus about *not* requiring this, bug 261874
JDT co-leadership
- what is the process?
  - Jeff: vote in community; then propose to the PMC
  - Would like to get Dani Meghert involved.
  - Philippe will check development process documents
Cocoa port
- Looking good
- Taking early access off and making it the "first" choice for Mac downloads
Milestone progress / 3.4.2
- Need to discuss M5 in arch call (should have done this last week)
- Should always remind the team in the arch call of upcoming deadlines
- Performance issues that need API to fix have to happen by M6
  - Teams should understand performance results (will be discussed in a couple of weeks)
Re: Reference Platforms
- Java6 on Solaris
  - Martin's company would like to support this
  - filed bug 262907 to discuss process and practices around reference platforms

Jan 21:

How should we track meeting minutes topic - Wiki
Provisional API conventions - Jeff working on bug 261874 for discussion at the AC
- should there be a tag in the Javadoc (ie. "experimental")?
- Jeff wants to keep the concerns "conventions" vs "Javadoc" separate
- Jeff, "... Javadoc should not be generated for provisional ..."
- Martin disagrees, "... need feedback and discussion for new API ..."
What is the role of the PMC lead?
- global view of components/processes
- organize architecture call, ensure we are on track
- spark conversations (ie. M5 is feature freeze)
Reference platforms
- we should choose JDK1.6, "update 11" rather than "update 4"
- around "RC time", solidify the reference platform (it is the one we are testing on)

Jan 14:

PMC component ownership x bugzilla pmc authorization

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Eclipse/PMC/Minutes 2009

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