For those who are living on the Eclipse bleeding edge and have a ton of launch configurations like me, you may appreciate this little new feature:
In Eclipse 3.4M5, you’ll be able to quickly browse to various logs based on your launch configurations. This is useful when bad things happen on startup and you have to hunt for the log… now you can do it quickly in a couple of clicks. It’s the little things that count, right :)?
A special thank you to Jacek for contributing the patch.
I’ve been pondering about committer-related things a lot lately since elections are coming up for committer representatives on the board (it’s better than running a smear campaign of YouTube videos against Ed Merks ;P).
Since the new year has started, I’ve been trying to think of an issue that bothers me personally and colleagues of mine. A common complaint I see from peers and job-seekers is the difficulty in finding Eclipse-related jobs and finding Eclipse-related talent within the Eclipse ecosystem. Any searches using the major search engines seems to be overcome by the pestilence of JEE-related jobs out there. At Eclipse, we have an obscure eclipse.employment newsgroup that doesn’t get much traffic because I can only count the people on one hand who are in hiring positions that would think of using a newsgroup to post jobs.
What’s the solution? I’m not sure, but to start, I’d probably create something like an www.eclipse.org/jobs where people can be informed of the various resources to find Eclipse-related jobs. If we want to get fancy, maybe we can allow Eclipse members to post jobs that specifically target the Eclipse ecosystem. In the end, I would want the people who think “I want an Eclipse-related job” and “I need Eclipse talent” go to the same place for information.
To help remedy this issue and open it up for the discussion, I opened a bug. If this is a concern for you and you have any thoughts on how to make things better, please comment and voice your support.
Just a reminder that it’s now possible to submit BOF sessions (and posters) at EclipseCon. I’ve always enjoyed BOFs at EclipseCon and highly recommend people submit sessions.
PDE will be hosting its annual soiree to discuss what’s new in bundle development land, where people think we should be headed and how tooling keeps saving the runtime from itself when it invents new headers like Eclipse-BundleShape.
We’ll also consume a few drinks in honor of PDE, Eclipse and OSGi (virgin daiquiri’s for Wassim though).
As a gentle reminder, for Eclipse committers and projects, the Ganymede IP Review deadline is in a week (the 31st). So how about everyone file their Contribution Questionnaires and not be shady about it :)?
It looks like Eclipse’s IRC presence is growing! The Equinox project recently announced it would join other Eclipse projects on IRC. Also, not so long ago, the Eclipse Modeling folks have decided to establish a base on IRC. This is great news as I’m a big advocate of having a strong IRC presence to foster community bonding and growth.
In the end, we’re one step closer to have funny IRC quotes published to bash.org 🙂
As a reminder for those people who manage Eclipse-based products, there’s a good opportunity to nominate your product for an Eclipse Technology Award. I was surprised to see the short-list of nominations given the breadth of the Eclipse eco-system and the number of sponsors this year at EcilpseCon.
On the bright side, I have a theory that there’s a lot of managers out there just waiting until the last minute to give their submissions for their excellent products and projects 🙂
So Brian and I completed our webinar today (thanks for attending!) and we took advantage of the option to customize our questions at the end.
Here are the results:
I always had a personal interest in how quickly products adopt new releases of Eclipse. The problem with most products is that they are on different release schedules (ie., 18-24 months) compared to the Eclipse 12 month cycle. The challenge is to decide when to move up and if you decide to skip a release, how do you portray that decision to your customers if they complain they can’t use some cool “Paul Webster” (eg., org.eclipse.ui.menus) feature from the latest Eclipse? I also wonder if the circadian release cycle of Eclipse forces other teams to become a bit more agile when it comes to releasing products instead of being stuck in that crappy 24 month cycle.
On a side note, I feel sorry for the one pour soul using Eclipse 3.1 according to the webinar stats 🙁
The tool-smiths behind PDE are at it again. In 3.4M5, we will bringing the Eclipse community a Help Context editor:
There’s still some polishing to do, but it all should be good before the 3.4M5 release date. Don’t know what help contexts are? Well that’s a shame, they are the magic behind the ‘context-sensitiveness’ of the Eclipse help system. If you’re writing some tooling or an RCP-based application that includes help, I highly recommend writing contexts to assist your end-users.
Many thanks to Curtis Windatt of Debug fame who got this contribution off the ground in time before feature freeze.
