| [cross-project-issues-dev] Luna release descriptions |
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If your project is participating in Luna, you need to read this
note and react accordingly. Shortly after EclipseCon, Ian will come to me to talk about the exciting new features in Luna that we need to include on the website, in marketing materials, or as talking points when describing the release to the press. In the past, I have tried to--from memory--recount some of new things I remember from chatter on project mailing lists or from release review materials. With the new Project Management Infrastructure (PMI), we have the opportunity to do better. The review materials are works-in-progress that have the potential to contain at least partial information now. Projects should already have plan information captured for the release. Minimally, they should have decent description of what's new and exciting in the release. Take a look at this page that summarizes the release descriptions for Luna: https://projects.eclipse.org/releases/luna/details Frankly, very few of the descriptions are actually useful. The "description" needs to describe the release. Describing the release as "the thing we're doing for Luna" isn't useful. This is an opportunity to draw attention to your project. An opportunity to attract users, adopters, contributions, and committers. An opportunity to grow your project's diversity. Besides, you need to do this eventually anyway as part of your release review. Unless these descriptions are improved, I'll be hard pressed to tell Ian anything when he asks. Here are some examples of some descriptions that I consider reasonable: -- ATL - A Model Transformation Technology 3.5.0 This release contains no particular enhancements. It fixes some minor issues and ensures compatibility with Eclipse Luna. Code Recommenders 2.1.0 This release integrates the Snipmatch code snippet search engine. It furthermore adds the ability to easily contribute new snippets to a shared repository. Under the hood, the performance of loading recommendation models has been greatly improved. EMF Compare 3.0.0 The main focus of the EMF Compare 3.0 release will be to complete the integration with Team and the various repository providers (EGit, Subversive, CVS, ...). Other themes include an overhaul of the user interface and further improvements of the matching engines, most notably on the content matching strategy. Equinox 4.4.0 The Equinox 4.4 release will continue to focus on implementing the latest Core OSGi specification and selected OSGi Compendium services. The next OSGi specification (Release 6) is finalizing in March 2014. The Equinox 4.4 release includes a full implementation of the R6 Core Framework as well as several compendium service implementations. Many of the Equinox specification implementations from this release are used as the Reference Implementations for the OSGi R6 specification. Dynamic Languages Toolkit 5.1.0 The DLTK 5.1 release will be primarily focused on bug fixes. -- There's still some room for improvement. Some of these give me cause to look a little harder at the plans to see if there are any hidden gems, but there are few obvious new features or improvements that are worthy of being highlighted in press materials. I'll refrain for the moment from giving counter examples. Don't describe the document. Don't describe the project. Describe the release. If you have questions, or need assistance, I'm here to help. Wayne --
Wayne Beaton Director of Open Source Projects, The Eclipse Foundation Learn about Eclipse Projects 
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