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

["Francis Upton (News)" <francisu@xxxxxxxx>]

> Speaking more generally, I partially agree with Eric, in the sense that 
> I also experienced some difficulty to communicate with (in particular) 
> JDT developers in the sense that some request enhancements of mine were 
> just closed because "not in scope"... One day I also started to wonder 
> what actually were in scope for e4, but only recently I read something 
> about this topic on InfoQ.
>
> Maybe the most significant example is this:
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=204231
> In that request enhancement, I suggested the creation of a tool to edit 
> resource bundles, providing a hint of a third party existing tool (no 
> longer updated) that has all the features I would need from such a tool. 
> Well, the bug was initially closed after TEN minutes as WONTFIX because 
> there were no plan to add a new editor for properties (although what I 
> meant was totally different from the existing one).
> After complaining, I got it to be reopened, but I was left with very 
> scarce hope...

I have had several interactions with the JDT team on various issues, and 
while I have disagreed with them on some things, I have found them to be 
 very responsive and agreeable to contributions that they could see 
make sense (I was able to contribute an extension to LTK undo with their 
guidance that solved my problems).  It's also apparent from their 
attitude and interactions they are very good owners of their components, 
as they work very well and want to make sure they continue to work well 
for everyone in the long term.  This attitude is exactly what you want, 
as far as I am concerned and I look forward to continuing to work with them.

Whenever I want something that's not there, I assume I will have to 
provide it, if it's something relatively small, I generate submit a 
patch with the bug report.  If it's something larger, then I will ask if 
the thing I want would be accepted as a contribution and outline what a 
contribution might look like.  Once I get agreement on these points I 
make a contribution.

Open source works like that; we (as clients) have no right to demand 
anything.  We are not paying for anything, and we are lucky that we lot 
more than we pay for.  However, unlike commercial products, we are able 
to contribute our own work.

One of the things we might be able to improve in our community 
development is to provide an easy way to identify the projects that want 
contributions, so if you can't make the contribution, perhaps there is 
someone else who is interested in the same thing or something similar 
that's able to.  I realize that bugzilla is used to track all of this 
stuff and we do have flags for things that we want contributions for, 
but maybe all we need is a little more documentation (perhaps just a 
wiki page) with some guidance about how to use these.