If you’re an Eclipse committer, contributor on enthusiast, I highly recommend checking out the Eclipse presence on IRC. We have quite a few project channels and more importantly, lots of people helping users on the #eclipse channel. It just takes a minute of your time to idle there and answer a question or two when you have time. You can even make a difference in someone’s development life in real-time:
So, give IRC a try and help liberate people 🙂
This is my semi-annual notice of considering IRC as an option to reach the Eclipse community and the adopters of your Eclipse projects.
There has been growth on IRC since last year… we have seen the number of people participating in #eclipse increase to about ~150 and about ~35 in #eclipse-dev (I’d say about ~30% growth). We have also seen popular Eclipse projects like Equinox (#equinox-dev) and Modeling (#eclipse-modeling) make their debut. I’d love to see other projects follow suite, like those CDT guys as there are frequent CDT questions in #eclipse
In the end, this is just another avenue to reach the users of your technology and help support them. It also tends to have a more personal feel than say newsgroups or mailing lists. IRC allows you to build a kind of camaraderie not found in other communication avenues. This is all part of something I jokingly call zx’s law. zx’s law states that the success of an open-source project is highly tied to the number of people that idle in its IRC channels. Just look at #ubuntu and its 1000+ users.
On a side note, someone crazy thought it would be funny to write an Ajax-based IRC client called Mibbit. For those behind crazy firewalls, Mibbit may be a good option as it provides a clean IRC user interface.
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 🙂
In response to where committers should roam, Eclipse developers raised concerns about accessing IRC behind corporate firewalls. Well, I found somewhat of a solution: IRC@Work.
How about that, don’t think corporations can block port 80.
It’s amazing to see how far Ubuntu has come… I mean, I remember about 3 years ago when I was helping man a Gentoo booth at the LinuxWorld conference and there was this new Linux distro located across from the Gentoo booth called Ubuntu. I didn’t really remember them having a laptop, but they had a cool logo and all they did was scream “Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu” in a weird tribal voice when people walked by. I thought, ya these guys are going to go really far…
Anyway, those Ubuntu guys are pretty smart and understand how to build online open-source communities with their upcoming Ubuntu Open Week. Online workshops are a cool idea, especially when they are done in IRC. Looking at Ubuntu’s support network on IRC is amazing… ~1200 users at anytime helping each other out. It’s amazing feeling of jumping on IRC and asking a question and getting an instant response…
Ian, what do you think?
In reply to Pascal’s recent blog post committers roaming together, I thought this would be a nice time to tell the Eclipse community about IRC again. A popular venue in the open-source world to chat about things and roam is IRC. In Eclipse, we have #eclipse where users come to ask questions about their Eclipse problems, #eclipse-dev where committers hang out, and various other channels specific to projects. What I would like to see is more adoption of IRC by committers. It would be nice to say go in the #eclipse-dtp channel and find DTP committers and ask them about a problem or why they do something a certain way.
Come on guys, IRC isn’t like Gopher which went out of style in the 90’s… give it a try.
Ok, I’ve finally done it… I’m putting together a bugday for Eclipse! The first bug day will be July 27 2007. Don’t know what a bugday is? Please check out the FAQ.
Note, this will be a small experiment first to see how things go. If we get a lot of contributors from the community stepping up to participate in bugday, we’ll continue having them and expand the number of committers that participate!
If you’re a community member and ever wanted to have code included in an Eclipse release, well now is your chance 🙂 Check out the FAQ to learn how to participate. It will be as simple as picking certain bugs (these are keyworded as ‘bugday’ ) chosen by the projects participating in the first bugday. Don’t worry, these bugs are geared for first time contributors. For example, ECF has a bug that wants to add a default IRC server. WTP has a bug to reorganize the location of some wizards. If you’re interested in any of these bugs, please let the bug authors know in the bug and update the wiki with your intentions.
Other than that, I hope some people choose to participate as the Eclipse Foundation has offered some swag to the first participants of bugday. Feel free to ask me any questions via email or on this blog via a comment.
Also, thanks to everyone on IRC that has helped put this together (Nitin, Remy, Paul, Kim), couldn’t do it without you guys.
It’s that time again, my semi-annual lambasting of people to get on IRC. With the Europa release, getting on IRC should be easy as pie with ECF (heck, you don’t even need to leave Eclipse anymore to chat!). I tend to keep my IRC presence in a fast view so it’s easy to hide and bring up when I feel I need to chat or someone pings me. There are two main channels, #eclipse (for everyone) and #eclipse-dev (for committers).
For those who don’t “get IRC,” well, it’s the way it works in open-source. Open-source users these days expect to find help on IRC from open-source projects. Having a strong presence on IRC tends to be equated to having strong community outreach (when is the last time someone said something bad about Gentoo‘s community?) I would love to see more CDT and PDT people on IRC as there are a lot of questions that go unanswered in this area. It’s also a good opportunity to get to know your fellow committers.
In the end, I mean, even Wayne managed to get things working, and he doesn’t get IRC at all 😉
In the honorable tradition of me trying to get more Eclipse people on IRC, I’d like to announce that the ECF team has come up with a cool IRC bot that could be useful for committers. Besides the coolness of being built on all Eclipse-technology (it may be the first OSGi-based IRC bot; the hell with eggdrop and its Tcl scripts), it has useful features that are described on an Eclipse wiki entry. The current Eclipse committers on IRC use the bot as a way to quickly communicate with Eclipse newcomers on common questions or even as an easy way to get at Eclipse bugs.
Call me an old school open-source developer, but I like my IRC and IRC bots (especially when they are Eclipse-based) 😉