One of the great things about my job is that it doesn’t really matter where I actually physically work (at least part of the time). I took the opportunity yesterday to spend a few hours watching my kids at hockey camp. It was a little weird sitting in the freezing arena wearing shorts with only my laptop to keep my legs warm, but it was awesome watching my kids zip and zag around on the ice.

And the respite from the heat outside was great for me.

I know that I found this a little weird at first, so I can completely understand the confusion around how we use the Eclipse bug system. To summarize: we use it for almost everything. Some projects have discussions entirely captured in the bug tracking system; many of these bugs are concerned with fixing actual problems, but some are discussions around new features. New feature requests can be made in the bug system (do this by specifying “enhancement” for the “severity” of the bug). Of course, reports of actual problems can be made.

We also use the bug tracking system to accept contributions. If you have code that you think should be part of some Eclipse project, you can contribute it to the project through the bug system. It’s the same for Eclipse Corner Articles. If you have an idea for an article that you’d like to contribute to Eclipse Corner, you can propose your article idea, contribute content, and discuss the the article through the bug system. You can see existing entries (please do feel free to chime in if you have input that you think can improve the quality of the articles). Of course, if you find a problem in an article, we’d all appreciate it if you could create a bug so that we can be made aware of the problem and do something about it.

The process for submitting an article is documented here (if there’s something on this page that’s confusing, create a bug describing the problem…)

Before you submit anything into the bug system, make sure that you have read through and understand the web site’s Terms of Use. In particular, understand that by attaching an article to a bug entry, you implicity grant us permission to use that submission.