[rt-pmc] What goes in Equinox vs. RT?

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I was about to post this feedback on
the Scala Modules proposal, but decided it's more of a general RT issue
so wanted to know what you all think about it. When I looked at the Scala
Modules proposal, I was wondering why it should appear as a sub-project
of Equinox rather than directly under RT. More generally, what criteria
should be used for new RT project proposals to decide if they become Equinox
sub-projects versus RT sub-projects.  The Equinox mission statement
says it is for OSGi spec implementations, infrastructure for running and
managing OSGi systems, and key framework services. I'm not sure where Scala
Modules, or even Equinox Aspects falls into this. On the other hand, other
RT projects such as ECF and the proposed Gemini project *do* provide implementations
of OSGi specs, but are *not* part of Equinox (I'm not suggesting they should
be - just pointing out the inconsistency).

My impression is that things get put
under Equinox because they feel too small to be separate projects on their
own, rather than for any specific technical reason. In this sense Equinox,
and the Equinox incubator in particular, are being used a general space
for any runtime-related technologies that don't naturally fit anywhere
else. Maybe this is all fine, but all the incremental content added to
Equinox does create a bit of extra overhead for various people who take
care of Equinox project management, web content, build, ip logs, bug triage,
release engineering, etc. Each new sub-project or component that comes
along doesn't create a lot of extra work by itself, but it adds up over
time as more and more unrelated pieces are being added to Equinox.

So, I guess my general question is how
you decide what becomes part of Equinox vs. under the top level RT, and
are there some alternative approaches we should consider? For example should
RT have its own top-level incubator like the WTP, Modeling, and DTP top-level
projects have? Or, maybe we shouldn't be worried about having lots of little
projects under RT, since under the eclipse development process all projects
are equivalent regardless of what depth they are in the project tree. Thoughts
anyone?

John