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[technology-pmc] Nexus Project or perhaps hosting micro-projects directly under Tools Project...

Technology PMC,

 

I am in the process of resuming work on Nexus Project proposal and I would like to seek your input.

 

The problem I am trying to solve is how to make Eclipse Foundation friendlier to very small projects. These “micro-projects” have two defining attributes: (1) their scope is rather small (most will likely only support a few committers and in a lot of cases as few as one) and (2) their scope is general enough to not make a good fit in an existing project. These projects can be broken up into two broad types: (1) frameworks that can be used by other Eclipse projects or the broader ecosystem and (2) end-user functionality (recent examples: image viewer and export editor contents as HTML).

 

The idea is to create a new project (Nexus) under the Technology Project to serve as an organizational point for managing these micro-projects. The Nexus project lead and committers would be responsible for:

 

1. Maintaining project website with information about how to go about creating a micro-project.

2. Promoting the idea that it’s now easier to create small projects (both internally and externally).

3. Serving as first-review filter for incoming project proposals. One important function would be identifying proposals whose scope intersects too much with an existing project.

4. Possibly managing org.eclipse.nexus.* namespace under which all Nexus sub-projects would belong (or we could let micro-projects use top-level namespace if everyone was comfortable with that).

5. Monitoring health of existing micro-projects and providing regular updates to Technology PMC.

6. Any necessary infrastructure (mostly build and distribution). The goal is to free sub-projects from having to handle this on their own. It’s likely that most of the needs will be addressed by the new build service currently being developed at Foundation’s level, in which case this is a catch-all for any remaining infrastructure work.

 

Some have suggested that we don’t really need a separate project for this function and that we could ask Technology PMC to accept and manage such projects directly. I tend to think that this will not scale effectively if we are successful in attracting large number of micro-projects, but I’d like to know where Technology PMC members stand on this.

 

Thoughts? Comments?

 

PS: There is an out-of-date wiki page (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Nexus_Project) that I’ve used in the past to work on this project proposal. It doesn’t reflect two important changes at the Foundation since the wiki was lasted updated: (1) it is now possible to create arbitrary levels of project nesting, so micro-projects can be actual projects rather than components, and (2) there is an effort under way to provide a ready-to-use build system directly from the Foundation.

 

- Konstantin

 

 

Oracle
Konstantin Komissarchik | Consulting Member of Technical Staff
Phone: +1 425 201 1795 | Mobile: +1 206 898 0611
Oracle Eclipse Tooling
411 108th Ave NE, Suite 2100 | Bellevue, WA 98004

 

 


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