[cbi-dev] Status update for Friday December 9th

[Andrew Ross <andrew.ross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone,

If you're subscribed to this list, you likely have an interest in the common build infrastructure.

The following is a very brief summary of the status of this project as of today.

1) CBI prototype moving to foundation hardware

Igor Fedorenko has been working for the past month or so to get the platform build working with Tycho. He's been able to get a prototype going that can be built and Eclipse starts so that's good. This build is expected to be running on Foundation hardware in the next week.

2) Modular vs. Monolithic Eclipse platform build

The Eclipse platform code repository architecture today is partitioned along code ownership boundaries rather than software architecture boundaries. This means it is necessary to build the platform as  a monolithic entity. Igor learned it was possible to break it into 30+ components but frankly Igor and the team felt this wasn't practical. For this reason, the platform build will need to remain monolithic for now. It is our hope to revisit this to move towards a more modular build in the future and make it easier for people to get involved with platform development.

3) Plan moving forward

We hope to get to the point where we can use the output from this build, run by hudson.eclipse.org, to produce packages. We hope to do this by the M5 milestone of Juno (February 3rd). No doubt we'll run into some obstacles and learn some lessons along the way, however at this point this seems like a reasonable objective. If you're interested in getting involved or just following along, thank you.

4) What does this have to do with Long Term Support?

The goal of the Long Term Support Industry Working Group(IWG) is to 
enable the Eclipse ecosystem to consume and provide maintenance and 
support for the full breadth of Eclipse technologies. The connection between LTS and the CBI is that we need to ensure software included in the scope of LTS can build from Foundation systems to enable LTS member companies to build on demand. As you'd expect, the Eclipse platform is a very important piece of this.

While we will encourage other projects to use the CBI by making it awesome, there are currently no plans to force projects to move to the CBI.

The ability to push branches between repositories is a "killer feature" git provides that cvs and svn do not. This is an important capability to enable LTS. There were existing plans for many projects including the platform to move to git. We will  encourage this.

Feel free to ask questions, point out anything that sounds funny, or comment. We've still got much work to do in these areas but things are progressing nicely.

Best regards,

Andrew