[orbit-dev] A (small) change to our retention policy ...

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Committers, 

We document our project's retention
policy in 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Promotion%2C_Release%2C_and_Retention_Policies

But, I'd like to change part of it ...
it has to do with the part about re-building old stuff. We would still
retain forever anything ever delivered ... this just has to do with re-delivering
old versions that are no longer used in active builds or releases under
development. 

The new policy is at 

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Orbit/Promotion%2C_Release%2C_and_Retention_Policies#Bundle_Retention_in_active_builds

To see how this "diffs" with
previous policy, see 

http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php?title=Orbit%2FPromotion%2C_Release%2C_and_Retention_Policies&diff=234721&oldid=232803

If any committers feel this is a bad
policy, please say so and we can discuss on this mailing list. 

If anyone sees any small improvements
in wording/spelling, etc., feel free to update the wiki directly. 

There is a couple of reasons I'd like
to make this change now: 

1. We need to practice and promote efficient
computing and use of our resources ... and our builds are getting overly
long, and our build-repositories too large. 
I'm not sure there will be any huge
reduction in time or size ... but the old policy seemed way too conservative,
leading to even longer builds and larger repos  ... I know first had
of some very old, no longer used bundles and it makes no sense to build
them over and over and over again for years, simply because there is not
a fourth version coming along. 

2. We will be promoting more use of
p2 repos and archived p2 repositories ... and the smaller we can make those,
the better .... efficient computing multiplies its returns :) 
Our current repo (zipped up) is nearly
200 Meg. I'm not sure how much smaller the new policy will make it ...
but ... 200 Meg seems too large to use on a practical day-to-day basis.
So, I don't want it to get even larger,
under the old policy. 

3. The old policy seemed to be worded
in a legalistic way that was intended to provide some absolute rules about
 (not) removing things ... but as I looked at some old things of mine
to remove, I realized this old policy did not leave any room for "committers
judgement" ... and it should. 

So ... it would be wrong to remove things
willy nilly from active builds ... simply because "you" were
no longer using it ... but, it is also wrong to build something over and
over and over again for years, when we know no one is using it. (And, in
many cases, even if someone did still need it, it is still there in an
old repo ... no need to rebuild it over and over). 

Let me know if questions or objections.


Let's set an aggressive "close"
date of one week ... 1/19/2011. If no objections by then, we will consider
the new policy official, and then we'll have some time to remove some of
the more obvious old things before M5. 

Thanks all,