[eclipse.org-architecture-council] research on switching build systems

[Kim Moir <kim.moir@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello architecture council

Last summer I spoke with Bram Adams about research topics in the Eclipse community with respect to release engineering.  At the time, he was a post-doc at Queens in Kingston, Ontario with the Software Analysis and Intelligence lab.  He is now an Assistant Professor at Ecole Polytechique in Montreal and continues to conduct research in release engineering and build optimization in open source communities.  His research team is now working to analyze open source projects that are switching build systems.  The have already completed analysis of the KDE and Linux community's recent migrations and thought the Eclipse community would be an interesting new analysis. 

In his words, 

"The idea would be for us to run our metrics and 
analyses on the source/build code history before switching and after 
switching, then compare the characteristics of both. Of course, the 
different technologies will require us to redefine the metrics for the 
new technology (such that the metrics can be compared between two 
technologies), but if done well we should be able to measure the 
improvement in build system complexity and overhead. Even in projects 
where no migration has happened yet (but is planned to), we can still 
measure the evolution of the complexity and overhead to find evidence 
that a migration is needed.
"

He asked me to if it would be possible for me to compile a list of Eclipse projects that have recently changed build systems, when they changed, what they switched from and an email contact.  The recent project that come to mind that have recently changed build systems are CDT, Mylyn, some Webtools subprojects and the Platform is taking steps to use the CBI.  If your project changed build systems, (ie. PDE build, Maven/Tycho, Buckminster etc) within the last two years, please send the info to me and I'll compile the information and send it to him.  I don't think he will be asking you for data as they usually just look at the code repos but may have an occasional question (summary: little if any work from Eclipse committers expected :-)

Thank you in advance,

Kim

SAIL, Queens http://sail.cs.queensu.ca
Lab on Maintenance, Construction and Intelligence of Software,  Polytechnique, Montreal http://mcis.polymtl.ca/index.shtml
Previous research on Eclipse build systems summarized http://relengofthenerds.blogspot.ca/2011/08/research-release-engineering-and-roi.html