[cross-project-issues-dev] Ready for M4? Kepler?

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Its official. The Planning Council formally
approved the requirements document [1] at today's meeting [2]. It is essentially
the same as last year, though some small things were removed or cleaned
up. Its well worth (re-) reading, though I know its long ... there's years
worth of accumulated "Eclipse way" know-how codified in there.
 

For anyone who's not on the train yet
and still want to join, its not too late ... but you should be in the aggregation
build by M4, which is not far off (12/14 to 12/21, with 12/19 the last
day to make a contribution to the common repository). 

If you need help, just ask. If you're
"new", you'll want to bookmark the Kepler Wiki [3] and in particular
soon read "how to get in a build" [4] ... in addition to the
requirements [1]! 

I've also updated the Google calendar
[5] with our main dates (for the Kepler release, and its two service releases)
though the dates in the Simultaneous Release Plan [6] are the official
ones, so if anything looks "off", let me know. 

If there's one thing I'd like to see
improved this year, its the compliance to the "non-greedy" requirement
(where runtime optional bundles are not installed greedily ,,, but installed
only if specified in a feature). This is really important to adopters and
other projects so they get a consistent install or build regardless of
what happens to be in a repository they are pointing at ... and allows
adopters to supply hot-fixes to customers via feature patches.  Predictability
and consistency ... that's what we're after. I know last year we didn't
pay much attention to this until near the end and some issues could not
be worked out in time. If questions, please ask on this list ... I'm sure
some expert reader knows the answer. I didn't do a good job of educating
others last year (or, maybe I missed some education myself) so I appreciate
another opportunity to improve. 

Thank you all for your contributions!


[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/SimRel/Simultaneous_Release_Requirements
[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Planning_Council/December_05_2012
[3] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Kepler
[4] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Simrel/Contributing_to_Simrel_Aggregation_Build
[5] https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src="">
[6] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Kepler/Simultaneous_Release_Plan