[wtp-dev] Milestone Plan Completion Action Items - Status Requested

[Arthur Ryman <ryman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Would all component leads please carefully
review this note and reply to it with your status. All component leads
should complete their milestone plans asap, ideally by the end of this
week. Please report the current status of your milestone plan and the target
completion date. 

SCHEDULE

We need to finalize our milestone plans
for the remainder of the 1.0 release. Our plan is to have milestone releases
every 8 weeks, and then release WTP 1.0 shorty after Eclipse 3.1 GA.  Our
milestones will be based on Eclipse 3.1 milestones [1] Here's our draft
schedule:


2/25 WTP 1.0 M3 based on Eclipse 3.1
M5 (2/18)
4/22 WTP 1.0 M4 based on Eclipse 3.1
M6 (4/1) - API Freeze
6/17 WTP 1.0 M5 based on Eclipse 3.1
M7 (5/13)
7/29 WTP 1.0 GA based on Eclipse 3.1
GA (6/25)

XML FORMAT

Please write your plans using the XML
format created by Craig Salter. Follow Craig's XSD component example [2].
The purpose of the XML format is to 1) give all plans a common look and
feel, and 2) to allow us to automatically aggregate all the component plans
into a master summary plan (with links back to the component plans). 

If you are not comfortable with XML,
use HTML for now and convert it later. Don't let moving to the XML format
delay the completion of your plans.

API DEFINITION

Note that I have marked M4 as our API
freeze milestone. API definition is a high priority item and should be
included in your milestone plans. Within each component you should only
define API where you know it is required. Our goal is to provide a stable
API so any API you define now must be preserved in future releases. You
can always add API in future releases, so be conservative now.

Jeffrey Liu has added the currently
available Eclipse "internal" tool to our build process. See M2
for an example of the output [3]. You can use the output to help you identlfy
users of your components.

The output from this tool does not reflect
the concept of a component. It works at the plug-in level, not the component
level. A component is a collection of plug-ins (and plug-in fragments).
It is OK to use internal packages across plug-ins within a component. We
are working with Jim des Rivières  (aka Jeem) to upgrade the API scanning
tool. We are going to precisely define the concept of a component (i.e.
we'll define a component.xml file that is analogous to the plugin,xml file).
This will eliminate a lot of the false positives from the tool.


[1] http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/eclipse_project_plan_3_1.html
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/wst/components/xsd/M3/xsd_milestone_plan.xml
[3] http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/S-1.0M2-200412230036/internalReport/index.html

Arthur Ryman,
Rational Desktop Tools Development

phone: +1-905-413-3077, TL 969-3077
assistant: +1-905-413-2411, TL 969-2411
fax: +1-905-413-4920, TL 969-4920
mobile: +1-416-939-5063, text: 4169395063@xxxxxxx
intranet: http://labweb.torolab.ibm.com/DRY6/