As you may or may not
know, the Eclipse community has come around to the idea that all projects
should produce plans (go figure) and that these plans should be in a common
form. This is goodness all around.
Consumers (or worse,
potential consumers) have a really hard time understanding what is going on
in all the different projects if they plans are spotty and are structured
differently. Standardized/required plans help.
To give the community a
high-level view of what is happening at Eclipse, we produce a Roadmap (here
is the 2007
Roadmap). Producing this document is a whole lot easier and the result a
whole lot better if there is a standard and machine processable plan for
every document. Another bonus.
Developers are
notoriously lazy (that’s a good thing). Having a standard plan structure
makes it really easy for me (uhhh, some project lead…) to snag/reuse whole
plan sections like the milestone dates from another project. My goodness, why
didn’t we do this sooner?!
There is no free lunch.
Teams with existing plan practices will need to change a bit and teams that
don’t currently produce plans, well, get with the program!
Oh, and yes, there is a deadline. Projects
should have their plans available in the standard form linked from their
project metadata (project leads, see your portal pages) by the end of September.
You have about 3 weeks.
Confused? Not sure what
this is all about? See the helpful wiki page
on project plans and the even more helpful page on Eclipse development
resources. Or talk to your project lead/PMC members. Surely they know
what is going on…
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