Choice is important when it comes to open source and we try to provide it at Eclipse. To promote choice, your lovely build.eclipse.org maintainers have kindly installed the Chuck Norris plug-in.
So now you have a choice between the Hudson butler and an ass-kicking Chuck Norris on your build page.
Chuck can be activated on a per-hudson project basis. It’s off by default.
Enjoy. Activating Chuck is so much better than working on EclipseCon presentations 
I’m pleased to announce I have decided to join Red Hat.
Gandhi said you must be the change you wish to see in the world. I was given a unique opportunity to change things and am looking forward to it. Look for me to strengthen the state of Eclipse on Linux and improve the state of Git tooling at Eclipse. On top of that, I get the opportunity to spread the Eclipse and OSGi love to the JBoss folks.
I look forward to seeing everyone at EclipseCon and enjoying some frosty beverages.
As David Green mentioned recently, there’s been some momentum building around documentation best-practices at Eclipse. Documentation has always been one of those pain points in Eclipse (or for most open source projects imho), from lack of consistency to not being able to leverage your community to improve the situation.
Through the work of the Eclipse Architecture Council (in particular, Dave Carver) we now have a set of basic documentation guidelines at Eclipse that projects can reference. There’s actually some good stuff in there with pointers to other open source projects on how they handle documentation (e.g., Ubuntu). However, there was one missing piece from those guidelines that always bothered me. For most Eclipse.org projects, the barriers are too high to contribute to the documentation because you generally need access to the source control system and commit access (on top of learning what format the documentation is).
For awhile, a few of us had the thought of leveraging the Eclipsepedia wiki as a source and generate documentation from that. If you use the wiki, all people need is a Bugzilla account and learn simple wiki markup in order to contribute documentation; people don’t need to be committers to contribute documentation! The Mylyn project pioneered this approach with their user guide and FAQ through the usage of WikiText. The only problem with the WikiText approach at the time was that there wasn’t an easy consumable example for people to use and learn from. Thankfully, this won’t be a problem anymore.
At EclipseCon 2010, David Green and I will be giving a talk on Documentation: Single-Sourcing, Crowd-Sourcing And Other Voodoo. As part of preparing for the talk, we created a nice example people can use when exploring WikiText. The example takes the wiki page of the example itself and generates some Eclipse help content from it. You can grab the actual code for the example from GitHub.
We hope the example serves people well and that more Eclipse.org projects start looking to source their documentation from the wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to let us know.
Otherwise, please join us for our talk at EclipseCon if you can.
For those who don’t know, the Eclipse Platform freezes its APIs soon with the release of Eclipse 3.6 M6… a great time to start targeting Eclipse if you’re planning to ship a product on the Eclipse Helios release (or a great time to start bribing platform committers for API changes). At this point, API won’t change and only a couple features will sneak in until 3.6 M7 which feature freeze hits. After that, it’s a sprint to the finish to get the Eclipse Helios release out the door.
On top of that, EclipseCon is less than 10 days away and I’m not done my presentations and tutorials yet.
The only reassuring thought is that I think I’m not the only one that is procrastinating a bit, right ?
Oh this is awesome… Eclipse is trending on Twitter.
On top of that, we’re nestled next to Chuck Norris! It’s good to be next to Chuck.
Ok, maybe it’s not the “Eclipse” I want it to be… but let’s consider it practice for when EclipseCon rolls around.
I’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff as of late that relates to Eclipse technology being used in academia. For example, Ugo Sangiorgi has been working on a position paper around the Sketch project for FlexiTools 2010.
Another cool Eclipse-related academic item I just saw was Code Bubbles. I also know that GEF3D has done some work in academia. Heck, the Mylyn project got its start as an academic project for awhile. I wonder if there’s something more we can do to make it easier for academia to participate in the Eclipse ecosystem and benefit from it. Here are some ideas that popped out in my mind…
- Should we have closer ties to academic conferences
- How about a list of all academic publications that use Eclipse technology
- How about having an “open source technology incubator” that lets people take a project and build a business (e.g., Mylyn -> Tasktop)
- Amend EclipseCon to accept position papers and have them published in a Eclipse focused academic journal
For those living in academia, what do you think? What would benefit you?
As of late, I’ve been helping a couple new Eclipse.org projects prepare for creation and release reviews. As an Eclipse.org project, you have to follow the Eclipse Development Guidelines. A part of that process is doing scheduled reviews when you’re ready to release. To make the review process a bit easier for some folks, I’ve created some unofficial templates on Google Docs you can use (just search Google Doc templates for ‘Eclipse.org‘ and you should find them).
On a side note, if you’re a project lead, a good place is to go to Eclipsepedia for information about the review process.
Hope you find this information useful.
My favorite time of year is about to start soon when it comes to open source development, Eclipse’s involvement with the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) program.
All people involved in the Eclipse community should post their ideas here. It’s a good time to start posting ideas, as students will start looking at mentoring organizations in mid March.
There is little downside in participating in this program in my opinion. As an Eclipse.org GSOC mentor, you get the rewarding opportunity to mentor a student in the ways of Eclipse and open source. As a student, you get Eclipse experience and paid for your contributions!
In the end, the whole open source community benefits.
In the past month, there’s been a lot of new Eclipse.org project proposals…
If anything looks interesting, feel free to give the projects feedback as they go through the Eclipse Development Process. Personally, I’m looking forward to the logo of the ELF project as I have this vision of an elf sitting on a moon (or something to that nature).
Today, the Eclipse Foundation’s Board Member elections start (to be exact, February 22, 2010 at noon EDT). You should receive an email with voting instructions if you’re eligible.
I insist you vote. If you can’t vote, I highly recommend you become an Eclipse Member as it gives the power to vote and influence the future direction of Eclipse.
The people that both represent committers and solution members have a unique position to push the board on specific subjects. I recall that last year, the committer representatives pushed extremely hard to have JGit hosted at Eclipse.org (due to it’s unique licensing situation). The first time we brought the issue up we were denied the move. However, through some passionate persistence on the committer representatives end, we pushed forward and were successful with the JGit move. The committer representatives also had a large impact on moving the Eclipse Marketplace forward. Although it’s not the appstore some of us envisioned yet, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
As for who you should vote for, I can simply say I vote for the people who are passionate and are committed (see Ed’s post) to the success of Eclipse. As always, I would be honored to be given the chance to represent the committers again on the board. I believe we have a great thing going on at Eclipse in respect to technology and open source project governance. I can only guarantee that I will continue to be passionate, do my best to attract/mentor new projects and improve the processes within the Eclipse community.
So what are you waiting for, rock the vote this afternoon.
Recent Comments