Europa Simultaneous Release

Note: This page discusses topics related to the 2007 Europa Simultaneous Release. Most of the Europa pages are deprecated. You are urged to find current information on pages related to the 2008 effort, currently named the Ganymede Simultaneous Release.

Simultaneous Release
Preceded by Callisto	Europa 2007	Succeeded by Ganymede

Goal

The goal of the Europa Simultaneous Release is the same as last year's goal for Callisto: to release N major Eclipse projects at the same time. We are doing this simultaneous release to support the needs of the ecosystem members who integrate Eclipse frameworks into their own software and products. While those product producers naturally accept the ultimate responsibility for their customers' experiences, Europa's goal is to eliminate uncertainity about project version numbers, and thus to allow ecosystem members to start their own integration, cross-project, and cross-product testing efforts earlier. Europa is about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle; Europa is about developers helping developers serve the whole Eclipse community.

While Europa is about the simultaneous release of N projects, it is not a unification of the projects - each project remains a separate open source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own project plan.

Projects

The projects that plan to participate in the Europa Simultaneous Release are listed below, along with their milestone offsets and their project lead. Details about Jar Signing and Pack200 status as of M4 have been removed. FYI: 175367, 132450, 163421, 175284.

Project	Project Lead(s)	Release Eng'g*	Offset	Ramp Down	Project Plan	Sign/Pack?**
AJDT	Matt Chapman		+1	Ramp Down	AJDT 1.5	JP
BIRT	Wenfeng Li	Xiaoying Gu	+2	Policy	BIRT 2.2.0	SJPD
Buckminster	Thomas Hallgren		+2	Policy	Project Plan	SJP
CDT	Doug Schaefer		+1
DLTK	Andrey Platov	Andrey Platov	+1	Ramp Down	DLTK 0.9	JP
DSDP DD	Doug Gaff	Ted Williams	+2	DD 0.9	DD 0.9
DSDP TM	Martin Oberhuber		+2	TM 2.0	TM 2.0	SJPD
DTP (Connectivity, Enablement, Model Base, SQL Tools)	John Graham		+1	Policy	DTP 1.5
ECF	Scott Lewis		+1	Policy	ECF 1.0.0
Eclipse (Equinox, Platform, JDT, PDE)	Philippe Mulet	Kim Moir, Sonia Dimitrov	+0	3.3 endgame plan	3.3	SJPD
Dash (Eclipse Monkey)	Paul Colton	Ingo Muschenetz	+2	Policy	Project Plan
EMF, EMF-QTV (Query, Transaction, Validation)	Ed Merks, Christian Damus	Nick Boldt	+1	Policy	EMF 2.3 EMF-QTV 1.1 EMF Participation
M2T (JET)	Paul Elder		+1	Policy
GEF	Anthony Hunter		+1	Policy	GEF 3.3	S
GMF	Richard Gronback		+2	Policy	2.0	JPD
MDT Note: EODM will probably not be providing a Winter Maintenance update.	Kenn Hussey	Nick Boldt	+2	Policy	MDT 1.0
Mylyn progress	Mik Kersten		+1	Ramp down	Mylar 2.0
STP	Oisín Hurley		+2	STP Ramp Down	STP Europa Plan
TPTP (Monitoring, Performance, Platform, Test)	Sri Doddapaneni	Hubert Leung	+2	Policy	TPTP 4.4	S J P
Web Tools Platform (WTP) WST JST JSF Dali(JPA)	David Williams Naci Dai Raghunathan Srinivasan Neil Hauge	David Williams	+2	WTP 2.0	WTP 2.0	JPD

* Add your name to this column if you need access to CVS to contribute to Europa features, and you're not already listed under Project Lead(s).

** There are four optimizing/conditioning tasks here. Place appropriate status codes S, J, P, D as appropriate: Signing, JarProcessor, Pack200, DigestBuilder

Corona has withdrawn from the Europa release due to some technical/distribution issues that could not solved in time to meet the release dates.

Testing Pre-Release builds via Policy Files

Projects can use policy files in the update manager to allow users to update against a different version of a plug-in than the one currently released. See Testing Pre-Release Builds Via Policy Files for more information.

Requirements For Participation

Projects that are part of Europa agree to abide by the following requirements.

Must Do

These are required for participation:

1. The projects must work together. This means that one should be able to load any subset of the Europa projects into Eclipse and each of the loaded projects should be able to pass all the same tests as if it had been loaded independently.
2. Projects must have build process maturity and their own functional project update site - the Europa site will reference these sites, not replace them.
3. moved to recommended
4. Projects must use 4-part version numbers.
5. eliminated due to bug 154505
6. moved to recommended
7. Any third-party plug-ins that are common between projects must be consumed via Orbit; the final Europa release will not have duplicate third-party libraries (note that this only applies to identical versions of the libraries; thus if project A requires foo.jar 1.6 and project B uses foo.jar 1.7, that's ok).
8. All plug-ins must correctly list their required JVM versions in the manifest/plugin.xml. See the wiki page about selecting the correct JVM [1].
9. Project representatives must attend the planning meetings and conference calls - you have to be involved to be involved.
10. At least one person from each project must subscribe to cross-project bug inbox, i.e. edit Bugzilla prefs to watch "cross-project.inbox@eclipse.org"
11. Build team members from each project will provide communication channels: phone, mail, IM, IRC and will be available during to-be-specified crucial integration times
12. Projects must have stated and demonstrated their intent to join Europa by the M4+0 date. Projects do so by adding themselves to the table/list above, along with their contact information.
13. Projects that have demonstrated an inability to synchronize with Europa milestones by M6 will be removed from the Europa simultaneous release unless the remaining Europa projects vote to retain said project.
14. Projects should have a written ramp down policy. (One of the issues identified with this guideline is that its not so much the ramp down policy of how many votes are needed for each bug fix that we need to be consistent on, but rather the meaning of each of the milestones and release candidates. Here [2] is the Platform 3.2 ramp down policy as a guideline for other projects.)
15. Projects must have their IP approved (a normal Eclipse requirement) and will follow the Eclipse Legal deadlines to do so.

Should Do

These are recommended for participating projects:

1. Projects should have jar'ed plug-ins because this is good Eclipse citizenship.
2. Projects should use Eclipse message bundles, not Java bundles because this is a good Eclipse citizenship. (see Message Bundle Conversion Tool and [3])
3. Build reproducibility? Require that projects be buildable by community members. Should be identical bits (but not required). All build assets and documentation in CVS/Subversion.
4. Non-project-team-members should be able to build each project.
5. Non-project-team-members should be able to run unit tests on each project.
6. Source tarballs should be created for Linux distros to build with.
7. Should have new & noteworthy for each milestone. Should be something readable and usable not just a static list of all the bugs. Corollary: individual new & noteworthy should be linked in to the collective New & Noteworthy.
8. Projects should use ICU4J when appropriate.
9. Projects should provide build RSS feeds as per the build workshop.
10. Projects should optimize their update site using pack200 to reduce bandwidth utilization and provide a better update experience for users. Additionally, they should do site digesting.
11. Projects should use signed plugins using the Eclipse certificate.
    1. by M5: TPTP, WTP
    2. by M6: BIRT, DTP, EMF

Milestones and Release Candidates

These milestone and release candidate dates are based on the dependencies of the projects (we call these the +0, +1, and +2 dependencies). Obviously, if a +0 date slips, then it will cause the +1 and +2 dates to slip; similarly for a +1 slip causing +2 slips.

Candidate milestone dates:

	Staging			Release
	+0	+1	+2
M4	Dec 15	Dec 21	Jan 4 Feb 7 Feb 14	Jan 5 Feb 14
M5	Feb 9	Feb 16	Feb 23	Feb 24
M6 - API Freeze	Mar 23	Mar 30	Apr 6	Apr 7 Apr 10
M7 - RC0	May 4	May 11	May 18	May 22
RC1	May 18	May 23	May 25	May 28 May 29
RC2	May 25	May 30	Jun 5	Jun 6 Jun 7
RC3	Jun 8	Jun 13	Jun 14	Jun 15
RC4	Jun 15	Jun 20	Jun 21	Jun 22
Europa	June 29

Mailing Lists

To avoid confusion amongst the various mailing lists in existence, Europa projects will use these lists:

• eclipse.org-planning-council [4] - the main list for the project leaders who are coordinating Europa
• cross-projects-issues-dev [5] - a list for developers and users who encounter problems with Europa: can't download, can't install, unable to make these two projects work together, etc.
• europa-build-workshop [6] - a list for the buildmeisters of Europa projects

Conference Calls

Wednesdays, 7am PT, 10am ET, 4pm CET, 5pm IT. 613.287.8000 or 866.362.7064 passcode 874551#

• October 18 - Finalize rules and dates (time)
• December 20 - mid-M4 (time) (minutes)
• Jan 3 - post-M4 (time) (minutes)
• Jan 17 - post-M4 (time) (minutes)
• Jan 23-24 - F2F @SFO (time) (minutes)
• Feb 7 - pre-M5 (time) (minutes)
• Feb 14 - mid-M5 (time) (minutes)
• Feb 21 - mid-M5 (time) (minutes)
• Mar 4 - F2F@EclipseCon post-M5 (time) (minutes)
• Mar 21 - pre-M6 (time) - cancelled
• Mar 28 - mid-M6 (time) (minutes)
• Apr 4 - mid-M6 (time)
• Apr 11 - post-M6 (time) (minutes)
• May 2 - pre-RC0; plan for remaining RC calls (time) (minutes)
• May 9 (time)
• May 16 (time) (minutes)
• May 23(time) (minutes)
• May 30 (time) (minutes)
• June 6 Release Review (time)
• June 13 (time)
• June 20 (time)
• June 27 (time)

IP Schedule

• IP Query
• All CQs must be submitted and prioritized by January 31st for Europa. This is a hard deadline.

Europa Builds

A number of utilities have been written to automate the assembly of Callisto (and now Europa) builds. These are available in their own CVS respository. You can find more information about how this is organized and individual project responsibilities for the build on this Europa Build page (and old information on the Callisto Build page).

The Europa Build page is where you go to learn how to add your project to the Europa build.

Coordinated Maintenance

We decided on September 28th and February 29th for the Fall and Winter maintenance releases. See specific band (+0, +1, +2, EPP) & freeze dates below.

	Staging			Release
	+0	+1	+2
Fall Maintenance	Sep 24	Sep 26	Sep 28	Sep 28 estimating Oct 4

	Staging				Release
	+0	+1	+2	EPP	Server Freeze	Public Access
Winter Maintenance	Feb 18	Feb 20	Feb 25	Feb 27	Feb 28	Feb 29 March 7

The Planning Council (see Planning Council Minutes 2007.11.06) decided not to use the proposed Europa/Winter Maintenance Signoffs.