I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to give offense and shouldn't have used such inflammatory language. I don't want to disparage the efforts of our few overworked JDT committers -- you guys rock and I appreciate all you're doing.
By "devastating", I was referring to the impact of the bugs upon affected users, not trying to imply this is the fault of the committers.
> From my p.o.v. *any* Eclipse project / component could step up into the important role of using annotation processing and filing excellent bug reports which would perhaps
> allow us (Jay) to fix those bugs more efficiently
IMO, all teams should be dogfooding their own features since it's always way easier to fix a bug you discover while working on your own code than it is to try to describe that bug to someone else. Quite often you'll discover such bugs while you have the debugger open anyway. It's also much easier to do bug triage when you're dogfooding -- it's hard to tell the difference between a showstopper and a mild annoyance when you're looking at a stack trace attached to a bug report and the difference is much more obvious when you're experiencing it yourself. We all have way more incoming bugs than we can possibly fix, so good triage is important.
> few examples of "devastatingly bad" shape might help
I'm told by teams that do a lot of annotation processing that the compiler crashes on them frequently. A lot of my time at the moment is spent responding to user emails about Eclipse problems, and there seems to be a large cluster of reports around annotation processors. A lot of those crashes are caused by NullPointerExceptions. All of the bugs I'm aware of are in bugzilla (I've either filed them or updated them with any information I could locate).
I'd also like to try to help out more directly: I suspect my customers would benefit more from me fixing annotation processor bugs than the UI stuff I normally work on since this is what they complain about the most. Unfortunately, I'm still climbing the slope of the JDT core learning curve, so it may be some time before I can contribute decent fixes... but I'm very interested in trying to help Jay out in his difficult task.
I'm not sure that's enough, though -- dogfooding would go a long way toward making the bugs easier to reproduce.
> As another factor, I don't think it would be a good idea to use any kind of magic in the compiler source code, because this piece of code is used for bootstrapping in several projects and should be compilable with minimal requirements.
Would the use of annotation processors really be considered magic for the annotation processing sub-component?
> I personally don't think dog-fooding in JDT is the silver bullet here.
Oh, I agree. Dogfooding won't fix all our problems... I just think it will make it easier to fix a lot of them.
- Stefan
