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[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: E4 / SWT 4.0
Boris Bokowski wrote:
"Eric Rizzo" <eclipse-news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:g2bv8e$qd0$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Francis Upton (News) wrote:

*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 Apple examples are excellent ones, and I understand the point behind them. In terms of the M$ comparison, I was referring to Office, XP and Vista where we keep getting more and more eye candy and other features we don't need while numerous bugs and major usability problems are left unaddressed. Office, especially, has major problems with that.
Anyway, your point is understood; but it does not trump everything, and my point about conflicting messages ("we need more people to help" vs. "let's dedicate significant time and effort to e4") is also still valid, I think.


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.

While I agree with some of those assertions, I don't agree with them all (and for most of them, my degree of confidence is relatively low). For example, I don't agree that every software technology needs to have a browser-based strategy. I'm not alone in predicting that the current level of hype and mania may not sustain.
My broader point, regardless of the detailed ideas and decisions constituting the vision, is this: who is setting this vision and how can the community have more influence into it (in a meaningful way, not just as a token: "Yes, thanks for your opinion")? I find things to be too opaque and difficult to enter for the community in general and am trying to use this thread to raise awareness of that to the committers and project leaders.
BTW, I really do appreciate the participation in this thread that we're getting - it is a good sign, I think. I encourage more community members AND project committers to chime in so it's not just the loudmouths like me being heard ;-)

Eric