Re: [ide-dev] Development Process

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Every committer with the ability to do review are also committed in 
writing code. To take the example of JDT, all active committers are all 
working on Java 8 as Stephan explained (which is totally fine), so there 
is no time left available for reviews. There is a dozen of incoming 
reviews for JDT.
So the fact that there is no-one currently available to review stuff 
slows down the contribution process makes that some of this reviews will 
get ignored for some long time, and maybe not even make it for Luna. 
Why? Because reviewers are currently working on writing code.

The current bottleneck for contributions is not the amount of code 
produced by contributors, but the ability to review it by committers.

That's why I still think that getting the Foundation or contributing 
companier to hire developers won't make more contributions merged. 
Instead, ensuring there are some people who are committed in reviewing 
and which make reviews their very #1 task. Such people wouldn't be 
required to write features or to follow a roadmap. Just they would 
review contributions whenever one gets in. I don't think a company would 
be ready to hire someone just to review stuff, but they might be OK to 
found someone which would significantly speed up the contribution process.
So the Eclipse Foundation could hire the "Linus Torvalds" of Eclipse, 
who would commit in reviewing contributions on the Core parts of Eclipse 
(Platform, UI, JDT). But that brings various questions that doesn't make 
it so easy: Who is the Linus Torvalds of Eclipse? Can the Foundation 
afford it?