Planning Council Minutes 2007.11.06

These are the minutes from the Eclipse Planning Council face-to-face November 6th, 2007 at EclipseWorld in Reston, VA.

The main purpose of this face-to-face was to be the kick-off meeting Ganymede.

Europa Fall and Winter Maintenance

We began with a discussion of the Europa maintenance releases. We discussed various options for sign-offs, voting, etc. and in the end decided that the Europa Fall Maintenance Release issues were a one-off problem and were not likely to reoccur. Thus we settled on Nick's suggested dates but chose not to implement the sign-off table. See Europa#Coordinated_Maintenance proposals. We did agree that if we send emails about Europa build problems, cross-projects bugs, etc., we should use the "URGENT" label in the title to get through certain people's almost infinite inboxes.

Define the Ganymede Musts and Shoulds Rules

We discussed the defined the must-dos and should-dos. See Ganymede Simultaneous Release.

The project leaders mostly agreed to fix usability and out-of-box experience issues in the Ganymede time frame. However, the project leaders were unwilling to make that a must-do requirement. There were two main arguments: one was resources (people) and the other was that usability is more holistic than just conforming to a checklist. A good example of the latter was around the integration of documentation, examples, wizards, and the main tool sets.

Set Ganymede Milestone Dates

Discussed and set the dates. Added a +3 stage. Agreed to include the EPP packages as part of the Ganymatic so that they are always available and thus we do not need an extra step to create them. We chose not to incorporate voting or sign-offs and instead continue to rely on date-based builds. For details, seeGanymede Simultaneous Release.

Ganymatic

The Ganymede build system is running (see [1]). Further improvements are planned, including running pack200, building the EPP packages (see [2]), running junit tests, testing as many of the "must do" rules as possible, etc.

An action item for Bjorn is to implement a report card of should dos and must dos (probably a static report card).

User Interface Guidelines

Bob Fraser of the User Interface Best Practices Working Group said that they will come up with a "developer UI checklist" of about 10 items that is meant to be measurable and actionable but that the group will not to be in the business of enforcement. The group also encouraged projects to go through a UI work through with them. The UIBPWG has become a group for people who are interested in UI issues around Eclipse.

Packages

The Europa releases included four packages on the download page. This proved to be quite successful and we're planning to do at least the same thing for Ganymede. However one critique of the packages last year was that there was inadequate cross-project testing within the packages. So this year the projects that are incorporated into the packages need to agree to do some cross-project testing. Specifically, they need to agree to do their usual testing with the package rather than just with their own project image.

We will create packages (I call them distros) when there is an owner for package. For example, David Williams volunteered to have the WTP team "own" the Web Tooling package. They will be responsible for what is included in the package and for testing the package, etc. The package owner will:

1. Decide what goes into the package (in both the sense of conceptually evaluating proposed content, as well as soliciting other projects to participate if they should be included).
2. Will ensure the package gets at least some minimum testing from committers, and will work to promote widespread testing from community.

The packages will still be assembled by the EPP project and distributed by the Eclipse Foundation's main download site.

All of the projects agreed to move their custom "all-in-one" zips to be real EPP packages.

There will still be a Ganymede update site with all the projects but, based on the download stats from Europa, we expect most users to consume the distros instead of the download site. Adopters will continue to consume the update site.

The eclipse.org download page [3] will have distros listed on it again this year. If we have more distros owned by PMCs than slots on the download page, the EMO will choose four or five for the main download page and then there will be a second page listing all the distros.

Internationalization

An updated on the Babel project's implementation of the Aptana server-based contribution. There was discussion on how to submit and consume the results. In the end, we agreed that:

1. each project will specify which of their property files need to be translated. This will be done through an as-yet-defined either web-api or project meta-data item. Rich made the excellent suggestion that Babel should consume the map files if possible and then find all property files below that.
2. Babel will generate (and place in its own download directory) one language pack for each language; the language pack will cover all Eclipse projects.