I want to share with everyone an important EclipseCon Short Talk which I think needs some attention. From my experience, one of the biggest hurdles an Eclipse project (or Eclipse-based product) faces is setting up a good build infrastructure. What I mean by good build infrastructure is automated builds and good reporting that leads to easy diagnosis of problems. A prime example of good build infrastructure comes from the EMF team.
Nick Boldt (EMF) has developed a system where it is really easy to kick-off and disseminate information from builds. Particularly, the EMF project has two components which make it really easy to tell what’s going on with the project. First, there is the Release Notes component which associates bug numbers with releases (through clever committing and analyzation of CVS log files). The SearchCVS component allows you to search for commits easily.
What are people’s thoughts about the talk (vote!) or even a possible BOF at EclipseCon (or even an Eclipse project proposal around this idea!). It’s my opinion that all Eclipse-based projects could benefit from a unified build infrastructure (plus, it will get my colleagues to stop throwing profanities my way about handling build with Eclipse).