On 9/7/2016 5:34 PM, Greg Watson wrote:
I don’t know the internal organization of JetBrains, but their products show they have a strong architect who sees the big picture of their entire product suite and makes sure they have the frameworks in place that they all can reuse to make their products consistent, integrated, and easy to construct. And they have a strong product manager who knows what excites users and drives the development team to build those things.
Well, we have an architecture council. Shouldn’t they be the ones charged with doing this? Otherwise, what do they do exactly?
This is definitely something that the architecture council would work on, because many of its members deeply care about the IDE. But for this to work, project leads have to agree that they are not sovereign in their projects and have to adhere to requests like: - Cleanup your UI, UI contributions. - Make sure your keybindings are those - Integrate better with this or that plugin - ... Would you agree to such a thing? How would your employer react to that?
I, for one, would be quite happy if there was a standard. Anything that makes Eclipse better is a win-win for everyone. However, just saying “clean up your UI” or “fix your keybindings” would not be adequate. There would need to be a detailed “integration guide” that lays out exactly what is and is not acceptable. I think you could do this in a two step process: 1) create the “integration guide” and make it mandatory that new projects follow it; and 2) provide a grandfathered/sunset path for existing projects. The Foundation could also provide an evaluation service to assist in identifying what needs to be fixed to help projects focus their resources.
Greg |
