Planning Council/Indigo retrospective

Indigo Planning Council retrospective

These notes were collected at the end of the Indigo Release, at 9/7/2011 Planning Council call, specifically just to collect them. And not to solve issues, or even necessarily to suggest solutions, but just to capture issues (good and bad) while the release was still fresh on our minds. Where solutions are suggested below, it is intended to primarily better capture the issue discussed .. not to dictate a or pre-judge a solution. Action plans and solutions will be discussed later.

History

Indigo is the sixth simultaneous release, following Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Galileo, Helios. The Planning Council meets regularly to come up with plans and requirements. Eclipse Foundation projects can voluntarily join the simultaneous release. For meeting minutes, see http://wiki.eclipse.org/Planning_Council.

Comments from PC during 9/7 meeting

These rough notes were captured from the "brainstorming" session. We will refine in future meetings.

Positive things mentioned

communication was good, such as on cross-project mailing list,

seemed a little smoother than previous cycles

builds went smoother, mostly passing, only one respin needed

pretty standard, little hassle

quality was good

liked that "checklist" was de-emphasised (i.e. that I did not hound everyone to complete it, if they did not want to :)

happy with people willing to help get through issues

no surprise, dates as expected

Things that could have been better

could use more "in depth" testing or stress testing, especially of EPP packages, to catch regressions

some issues with b3 aggregator editor (over all, some thought editor hard to use)

would expect "repository" view,

would be nice to show how site would look "in the end"

would be nice to make part of build, instead of separate process and edits

many project "hand edit" files, when b3 aggregator editor used other files change too (as whole model is saved)

when working with build files, prefer not to need "eclipse" (too heavy), just adding a file would be better

some use "constant repository" to "get latest" (pros and cons ... need to be careful)

could be be easier to only "change URL" ... such as perhaps in a properties file

late changes to EPP packages (e.g. EGit, etc.);

easier builds (or example builds) would be good (Tycho, maven, etc., is working in right direction)
(Jesse reported that he, Chris A., and Dave Carver are working on some improvements in "dash" project).

Some mentioned they liked that more and more projects are using Tycho

Many requirements seem oriented to "IDE", but not "runtime". Maybe we could distinguish better in write-ups or statements of requirements.

Reference

See also last year's retrospective

See also others' retrospectives (which may or may not be related to "simultaneous release", per se)

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