[stp-pmc] Re-alligning the STP with current engineering activities

[Adrian Skehill <adrian.skehill@xxxxxxxx>]

PMC Members,

Over the last number of weeks there have been some significant developments at 
an engineering level which may need for us to review some of the earlier 
decisions we made when setting up the STP. These changes are not fundamental, 
they are subtle in the fact that the high level aspect of STP remains, but 
some of the assumptions that we made at project creation time no longer apply.

On the development alias / team meetings we have been discussing the adoption 
of a Hybrid Model to allow meta-data to be exchanged between various editors 
within the STP project. This model is designed to be highly flexible and 
extensible so that it can support the various flavours of runtimes that we can 
support in the STP. We need to find a way however, to get this model into the 
STP repository to allow the STP engineering team to flesh out the model in 
more detail so it meets our requirements and to allow each sub-project 
evaluate the model for its own needs. Incorporation of this model into STP is 
proving to somewhat problematic.

At the core of our charter [1] is the statement that we are going to use the 
SCA Model (the core sub-project) as the basis for all our tools. This area of 
code has not received any attention since initial contribution, is out of date 
and does appear to be an appropriate match to the sub-project requirements for 
modelling. The hybrid model approach would displace the SCA as being the core, 
although each project could optionally use it if they wished to exchange data. 
However, it would not be compulsory for editors within the STP to use it.

Having read through the STP Charter, this only affects one sentence, 
everything else that we are doing, including references to meta models is bang 
on what was originally envisioned.

My take on this right now is we have a few tasks to do in order to 
successfully introduce the hybrid model:

* Revise the charter to downplay the role of the SCA component within our 
project, and identify follow on activities required with the eclipse foundation.
* Remove the core project completely from the STP. There will be no "core" in STP.
* Try to identify a route by which we can take in the Hybrid Model ecore and 
create a new sub-project to accommodate it. I don't believe this significantly 
changes our charter, but do we need to bring this up for discussion with 
anybody in eclipse that is outside the STP project?
* Flesh out the Incubator project to allow us to accept other additional 
incoming contributions to the STP.
* We need to raise an IPZilla to bring in the core. Is there anything that we 
can do to speed up the review process, as quite a lot of modification will 
follow to properly use this model, and these changes are best made as far away 
from release dates as possible!

Thoughts?

Adrian Skehill.

Principal Engineer,
IONA Technologies.

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/stp/about/project-charter.php

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