[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: E4 / SWT 4.0

["Boris Bokowski" <Boris_Bokowski@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Two comments below...

"Eric Rizzo" <eclipse-news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:g2bv8e$qd0$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Francis Upton (News) wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> I'm just jumping in here, not really knowing the context of this, but I 
>> want to make a couple of comments to what you say:
>>
>> 1) The main problem is there are not enough people working on the code to 
>> get things done.  Much of the work is done by the committers, but also 
>> quite a bit is contributed.  But the sum total of that is far less than 
>> what we need to clean out the bug backlog and satisfy all of the requests 
>> of the community.
>>
>> *We need more people doing the work*; it really does not matter if they 
>> are committers or if they are contributors.
>
> I definitely recognize that (and I think many other people do, though 
> certainly not everyone who enters his own wish list feature requests). 
> However, while we hear from one side of the collective project mouth that 
> more contributors are needed, we hear from the other side of its mouth how 
> they are spending all this time and effort on e4 planning. Well, if you 
> have a backlog of bugs and enhancements to an existing code base, the 
> prudence of moving resources in such critical shortage to a completely new 
> effort is, well, debatable IMHO. Look at Micro$oft's history (and the 
> reason many of the MS-haters are haters) for an example.

I am not sure what exactly you had in mind, but to me, comparable situations 
in the history of Microsoft were when they decided to develop Windows 
instead of sticking with MS-DOS, or when they completely redesigned Windows 
3.11 and went to Windows 95 to make it easier to use, or when they decided 
to move everything over to be based on Windows NT to improve security and 
reliability.  Would you rather that they perfected MS-DOS, or Windows 3.11, 
or kept developing Windows 95/98/ME?

There are lots of examples like this in the computing world. Do you think 
Apple would still exist if they had continued to fix each and every bug in 
Mac OS 9 rather than making a cut and moving everybody over to Mac OS X with 
a solid BSD base? Don't they screw everybody over again by discontinuing 
Carbon and making Cocoa development a requirement? I am sure they haven't 
fixed all the bugs in Carbon before they moved their developers over to 
Cocoa.

The reason we are working on e4 as well as (not instead of!) the 3.x stream 
is that we believe that Eclipse as a component integration platform will not 
exist five or ten years from now unless we re-invent it in a way that makes 
Eclipse relevant to programmers using other programming languages, 
developers working on distributed applications, and users who would like to 
see (parts of) the functionality they use in an Eclipse-based desktop 
application in a browser. We will not achieve all of these goals within the 
next few months, but I think they work well as a vision for what we are 
aiming at.

> In short, it is not clear that a complete, ground-up redesign and the 
> accompanying re-implementing and all the completely new directions, and 
> <insert-your-favorite-e4-theme> is the best decision. So we need to do a 
> better job of educating the community about what is happening and the 
> directions that are being considered and how to become really involved.
>
>>
>> I think however we need to get a *lot* better at encouraging 
>> contributions and contributors.  We need more wiki pages and help and 
>> communication to help people contribute.  We need infrastructure for this 
>> so that all projects can have a lot of materials and support to make it 
>> easy to document how to contribute, find contributors, recognize 
>> contributions and contributors, and do a better job of identifying work 
>> where we need help.  Right now it's very uneven between projects because 
>> there is little in the way of common support for encouraging 
>> contributions.
>
> See, I think dedicating the short supply of resources to making those 
> things happen soon is more prudent than all the work being put into e4 
> already. How do I voice that concern/desire to someone who can actually 
> respond with authority? That's a somewhat rhetorical question, but not 
> 100%. And the "why don't you do those things yourself as your 
> contribution" response is a non-starter here; I'm trying to steer the 
> discussion away from that canned response and more towards "how can the 
> existing contributor community better serve the non-contributor 
> community?"
>
>>
>> 2) I also think, like any other open source (or many internal companies), 
>> it's largely a matter of relationships.  You can get what you want by 
>> contributing code certainly; and you can also get what you want by 
>> working with committers and other contributors and having them make 
>> things a priority.  If you are interested in a particular area, then get 
>> to know the developers and that's how you will influence things.  I'm not 
>> saying this is right, it's just how things seem to work (at least in some 
>> areas).
>
> I don't have a problem with that reality - in fact the embracing of 
> relationships as a fundamental driving force is one of the aspects of OSS 
> that I, personally, enjoy and consider essential to OSS success in 
> general.
> However, again using myself as an example, there are just often 
> fundamental differences of attitude/philosophy/perspective that make it 
> frustrating to break into the clique' of a project. My (least) favorite 
> example is the SWT/JFace philosophy of minimalism coupled with 
> backwards-compatibility-at-ALL-cost; it leads to these frameworks carrying 
> a lot of baggage that makes them simultaneously difficult to extend and 
> prone to excessive copy+paste coding. I do understand the driving forces 
> that led to that prevailing philosophy, but I see too much dogmatism in 
> some areas and too little flexibility in others. This is an example of a 
> situation where I can try to contribute various artifacts (from code to 
> design idea to behavioral change suggestions) but be thwarted at nearly 
> every attempt because of the philosophical differences (or merely 
> differences in the degree of philosophical dogma).

It is hard to argue against you when you claim that people on the SWT or 
JFace teams are dogmatic.  When I perceive people as dogmatic, I like to err 
on the safe side and assume that there are good reasons for their behaviour 
or belief that I just don't understand yet. Until I understand all the 
reasons, at which point it is much easier to discuss concrete technical 
points rather than calling someone dogmatic. (Then there is the possibility 
that someone is dogmatic for no good reason, but is extremely rare IMO.)

>
>>
>> The problem here is this is entirely a volunteer effort, and yes there 
>> are full time committers, but their company is effectively volunteering 
>> their time.  Personally, I don't want to see any more elaborate 
>> mechanisms for prioritizing things or having product mangement, etc 
>> because that will just add more process overhead.
>
> Agreed, 100%. I think the things that would make the biggest difference 
> towards engaging the community better and more are things like attitude 
> and open-mindedness, not things like more committees or policies or 
> procedures.
>
> Eric
>