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[buckminster-dev] IP-issues and hosting

Hi,
Eclipse.org has fairly stringent policies about what can be published. Everything has to pass through their IP-review process. During the work incorporating the native Maven binaries this has become a very apparent problem.

Problem 1.
We think that people working on the Maven code-base are best suited to author and maintain the Buckminster Maven plug-in but since they are not committers, everything they do must be submitted in the forms of patches to bugzillas. Any such patch that exceeds 250 lines of code must go through an IP-review.

Problem 2.
Everything that the new Maven bundle will depend on (transitively) must also be IP approved. That means every single line of source that leads up to the Maven binaries must be scanned. Eclipsed.org will only scan proper releases. Understandable since scanning snapshots would make an already heavy workload overwhelming.

Problem 3.
Open source software relies heavily on the fact that a large user community will test beta-software. Given the problems 1 and 2, it will be impossible for us to publish something that doesn't contain proper releases of third-party binaries at Eclipse.org and the time between when a user reports a bug and we can publish a new version of the feature will be very long (two weeks or more). So we get a catch-22 situation.

A possible solution?
I think I might have a solution for this and I want your opinion. Here's what I think we could do:

1. Move the code-base for a bundle such as org.eclipse.buckminster.maven to a host outside of Eclipse.org. Ideally to the same repository where the code that it's dependent on is hosted.

2. Publish a feature that contains this bundle and its dependencies on an update site at a public host. The feature would depend on a core Buckminster installation.

3. Publish a copy of the public feature at Eclipse.org without physically publishing its dependent bundles. Those bundles are instead fetched from the public host using the site.xml archive element. This copy would be maintained by a Buckminster committer at Eclipse.org and be subject to IP.

The user would not notice a difference.

From a development perspective, I think this would make things a lot easier. No more patches going into the Buckminster Bugzilla unless API changes are needed to the Buckminster core features. Patches going in the other direction could also be avoided if a Buckminster team member had committer rights to the remote repository.

What do you (the Maven people in particular) think about this?

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren


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