[eclipse-dev] Issues with large-scale development

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

One of the major development themes
for Eclipse 3.1 is to improve support for "Large-scale development"
in Eclipse. This includes improving collaboration for large, distributed
teams, but it also encompasses support for large workspaces. The Eclipse
committers form a large, distributed group, so we have no problems gathering
requirements for the first aspect of the problem. However, we don't tend
to work on very large projects or have very large workspaces (Eclipse is
broken up into many small projects and each committer tends to only work
with a handful of them).  This makes it difficult for us to see the
most pressing and important problems for those working in such environments.
 Bug reports have helped us identify some areas with room for improvement,
such as project creation (bug 74392), recursive deletion (bug 10628), and
building (bug 60803). We are making progress on these fronts, but want
to make sure we are not missing other problem areas for users with very
large workspaces and/or locally mounted remote file systems.  

This is a general call for those using
Eclipse for large-scale development to let us know what the major problem
areas are. What operations are very slow? Could the UI be improved or made
more responsive during long operations?  We are particularly interested
in applications of Eclipse beyond the Java IDE realm, such as in CDT and
web tools. Don't hesitate to also remind us about old bugs that have already
been reported that are still important to you, as they sometimes get lost
in bugzilla.

Please respond with issues and suggestions
on the platform-core-dev mailing list.  We don't promise to address
all of the problems that people may raise, although help with identifying
problems and implementing and testing solutions can greatly improve a bug's
chances of being fixed. Clearly there is a lot of potential work in this
area, so we want to ensure that we are focused on the areas with the largest
potential gain for the Eclipse community.