Skip to main content
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
Re: [pdt-dev] Pushing project forward
Lots of folks far more important to this project have already weighed-in on the Github (new) vs. Bugzilla (existing) issue tracker situation, so I'll refrain.  After all, BZ hasn't been a barrier to the 500 issues that are already there, right? :-)
But I will comment to say that I recommend the "harder" approach of continuing to maintain a stable, working PDT that continues to incrementally get better than one where a major break in releases happens and thus some stagnation.  This is a great way to hemorrhage existing users and lose the excellent momentum that's been built up through the stable, high-quality releases that have been coming over the past couple of years.
I realize this kicks some internal clean-ups and replacements of older modules down the road somewhat, but I cannot stress enough that PDT is "good" now and we don't want to lose that.  I'm not a Java nor a desktop application developer, so I realize I'm just putting this all on others, but these are my thoughts as a user over the past decade or so it's been available (I forget, and I did have some stints using phpeclipse, Aptana, and Zend Studio before all of that).
I think folks like us (users, but not core developers) could maybe step-up a bit more and help but I don't want to over-commit nor falsely raise expectations.  I do think it's important to look at what is realistically sustainable for the existing core team while leaving the door open to for additional developers down the line.  All it takes is for the winds to change and suddenly PDT looks like the right solution for some folks, including some that may want to sponsor existing or new developers.  Don't forget that an almost unknown fork [0] of an even less known HTML engine came to be the core of the most dominate browsers in the history of the web when the conditions became right. 


[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML


On 1/28/20 8:28 AM, thierry blind wrote:
> I prefer to introduce new model, and adopt interesting parts of DLTK (search engine, indexing) to IT. Most important things (Inference Engine and Code Assist) are fortunately mostly ready for that. Ok Dawid, if you feel more confortable/confident to continue the actual way, I have no objections. You're the real "architect" of PDT. Like I said, my first concern about PDT is visibility and perenity 😉 And fixing bugs lol 

> I think we should be able to move all current bugs into GitHub / GitLab.
I would do the other way, point the people from github to bugzilla (or other bug tracking system). I share the idea of Michele about having our own bug tracking system, like XDebug does. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
*De :* pdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx <pdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> de la part de Dawid Pakuła <zulus@xxxxxxxxx> 
*Envoyé :* lundi 27 janvier 2020 20:26
*À :* PDT Developers <pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
*Objet :* Re: [pdt-dev] Pushing project forward
Hi,

Technical:
I don’t want any “hold-on” step. I can off course imagine one cycle (3 months) delay between releases, but shouldn’t be bigger mostly because I’im using PDT for my daily work ;)
During previous releases we successfully replace a lot of ancient code (for example Indexer, Reconciler madness) , improve performance and introduce a lot of new features. DLTK had a lot of amazing stuff that move PDT forward in past, but this was during PHP 4 and 5. PDT 5.3 introduces non-java namespace model, and even this wasn’t implemented correctly due model limitation. Later PHP releases only escalate problems (traits, function/constant imports). As the result in most modern project, PDT have to dive  into AST to check what is going on…
I prefer to introduce new model, and adopt interesting parts of DLTK (search engine, indexing) to IT. Most important things (Inference Engine and Code Assist) are fortunately mostly ready for that. 

Organization:
I think we should be able to move all current bugs into GitHub / GitLab.
On 27 January 2020 at 18:35:47, thierry blind (thierryblind@xxxxxxx <mailto:thierryblind@xxxxxxx>) wrote: 


Hi everybody,
thank you Michele and Basil Mohamed Gohar, your point of view are very accurate to me.
My first concern is, probably like many open-source developers, that the projects I contribute are perene. I've seen too many (little and big) projects dying, by lack of interest of the community or by the main developers themselves. Well yes, sometimes it's for more basic reasons, developers also need to eat and earn money, and their job can take all their time and energy. Also with time, developers change their occupations to try new challenges. If I look at eclipse itself now, I find it myself less "sexy" than other newer technologies, based on nodejs for example (I was thinking at Visual Studio Code). 

But PDT is a great product and has still a lot of potential.
PDT is daily used by myself, by my developer colleagues and by other people I know and they are happy with it. Like Dawid said, PDT code changed a lot the 5 last years, and in the right direction. It's much more stable now that when I started to contribute to PDT, a lot of work was done by a little team, and Dawid contributed A LOT, because he has a good global view/skill of the eclipse plateform.
PDT has a lot of feature and I think it's really worth (at least for me) to put some of my free time to make it even better. But the more I do, the more I see that 2 active developers are far from being enough for such a big project, for many logical reasons I won't enumerate here (one being lack of free time). If we migrate to github, to have more visibility, we will maybe be overwhelmed by feature or evolution requests, and maybe also by bug reports that are already on bugzilla. So migrating to github? Yes for sure. But without new developers, I feel it will be a pain with our actual capacities and it will add an additional workload. And that's my real concern about PDT. We have to stay realistic about our real capacities and reactivity to answer user requests, or we will generate more frustration and delays. In the 500 opened bugs, there are a lot of enhancement requests, and many are justified.
For the 4 technical points, I'm agree by removing old stuff and adopt more adequate technologies, even if we need to rewrite the PHP model and other things. We have a lot of code that needs to (or could) be revised to be more efficient, but with the proposed changes, it's like developing a new product from the scratch. I feel that many PDT code parts have reached their technical "limit".
So, what is the best solution? Rewrite big parts one after the other, probably breaking a lot of things and delaying new PDT releases? Or puting actual PDT in maintenance mode and rewriting in parallel a whole new PDT product? Keep in mind that we are only 2 developers yet and that Dawid has a lot more PDT/eclipse technical background then me 😉 

Thierry.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
*De :* pdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> <pdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx>> de la part de Michele Locati <michele@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:michele@xxxxxxxxx>> 
*Envoyé :* lundi 27 janvier 2020 14:52
*À :* PDT Developers <pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>>
*Objet :* Re: [pdt-dev] Pushing project forward
Hi Dawid,

sorry for not being able to contribute to this project.
In addition to a chronic lack of spare time, for sure the knowledge of Bugzilla/Gerrit/GIT/Jenkins is a bit of a barrier for newcomers... I committed a couple of changes a while back, and if I had to do that again today it'd take me an hour or two just to remember how to do that. If compared to the standard GitHub flow (clone + create a pull request), contributing to PDT it very over-complicated IMHO.
Furthermore, being on GitHub gives more visibility to the project, and integrating with GitHub Actions to do tests is a real pleasure. 

So, I'm 100% for moving to GitHub...

--
Michele
Il giorno lun 27 gen 2020 alle ore 15:03 Dawid Pakuła <zulus@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:zulus@xxxxxxxxx>> ha scritto: 

    Hi,

    Couple days I opened thread for Handly migration. Despite to
    final results I looking for way to get involved more people into
    project.

    For now we have two active comitters, Me and Thierry. We have
    couple supporters on bugzilla (for ex. Filipus and Michele). Due
    a this I’m afraid that sooner or later project will be dead or at
    stagnated.
    Our PHP package is quite popular, and we have stable number of
    downloads: ~30 000 for EPP + ~10 000 from marketplace. Some
    distributions like Ubuntu have own packages so don’t know everything.

    Our code base evolved a lot since last 5 years, and now is much
    easier to implement new features or improve existing, but we
    still have incredible mess :P

    So, how to push project forward?

    Internals:
    1. Validation and PHP model :  as I wrote earlier I think we
    should abandon some DLTK features and implement own model and
    inferencer. Without this upcoming PHP 8 will be extremely hard to
    implement in efficient way.
    2. JavaScript integration : JSDT is dead, we should add Wild Web
    Developer features
    3. We have over 500 bugs, and they are still relevant
    4. Nuclear option : switch to Generic Text Editor without WTP

    Project management:
    I liked Eclipse Bugzilla/Gerrit/GIT/Jenkins infrastructure but
    most of our users probably prefer GitHub or GitLab. I think we
    should consider switching to GitHub or upcoming Eclipse GitLab
    instance.

    Please say what you think? Commiters, contributors, users, adopters?


    _______________________________________________
    pdt-dev mailing list
    pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
    To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or
    unsubscribe from this list, visit
    https://www.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/pdt-dev

_______________________________________________
pdt-dev mailing list
pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe from this list, visit 
https://www.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/pdt-dev


_______________________________________________
pdt-dev mailing list
pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe from this list, visit
https://www.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/pdt-dev

Back to the top