Hello all
Who am
I - I'm the new tools development manager at QNX. I've been attending the
monthly CDT call for a while so you may recall me from there. I'm also part of
the Eclipse councils for requirements and planning. Over the next while I'll be
helping where I can to facilitate CDT planning. Below I've outlined what
the Eclipse councils are about, what we can do as a project to support this and
a proposed approach for planning future releases. All of this pretty much
builds on what was done for previous CDT releases.
The
eclipse foundation has three councils: requirement, planning and architecture
(see link at bottom for more info). One of the mandates of these councils is to
produce an Eclipse roadmap. So far, the requirements council has gathered
input from the eclipse membership and PMCs. From this input they will come up
with a common list of Themes and Priorities (T&P)for Eclipse. The
objective is to have the 36+ Eclipse projects express their requirements in
terms of this common list of T&P. The benefit will be two fold: a
common means of expressing requirements to the development and user community;
a means of letting people know what's important to Eclipse. The next part
of the puzzle is planning.
Each
project in the Tools PMC will be asked to create a project roadmap for the next
twelve to eighteen months; roughly half a page, no more than a full page.
The format will be something like this:
Roadmap
Name of Project
Executive summary of current plan.
Link to current plan
Forward looking statements/ T&Ps
Link to future plans
The T&P will be the "big rocks" i.e.
significant new functionality or technology that the project would like to see
implemented. This summary of T&P will point off to the more detailed
plans that may implement individual priorities.
So as
a first step this is a call for Themes and Priorities for CDT, remember the
"big rocks". eg refactoring functionality, DOM etc. These
are the things we would like to see done and feel are important to the future
of CDT. These T&Ps will be further qualified in terms of commitment ie has
anyone committed to doing the work yet. This will help set expectations
and also let people know where they can make a contribution.
As a
second step we need to determine a release plan for the next eighteen months.
We may need to have a call on this one, but here is proposal to consider. The
Eclipse Platform plans to have a large release every June, CDT should plan a
significant release to coincide ( or at least be off set by a couple of weeks).
In addition to this yearly release, we would always plan one additional release
that would be roughly six months afterwards. All minor releases (e.g.
2.1.1, 3.0.1) would be driven on an as need basis as it has in the past. This
proposal has a few good points: it establishes a regular release plan around
which we and those dependant on CDT can plan; the major platform releases are a
natural place to synchronize; minor releases are flexible and can be driven by
need; it allows adequate time for development between releases; is a reasonable
number of releases for a year.
This combined with the T&Ps will form a simple project
roadmap which would be part of a larger Eclipse roadmap (ie the sum of the
project road maps.)
The third step will be to flesh out plans for the releases starting with 3.0
(draft already posted). For the other releases, we would at least create
a project plan and populate the plan as requirements and resources are
identified.
Hope
this all makes sense, we can discuss it in tomorrows call.
Derrick
For
those who would like more info on these councils http://www.eclipse.org/org/index.html on the left
hand side look for the link that says 'council'.
