Re: [ide-dev] Fixing the Target platform editor

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/22/2016 03:44 PM, Gunnar Wagenknecht wrote:

You are making a good point. However, you should know it's by far not as easy as you write it.

Sure.

 Then it became lack of resources. Later on it was inexperience with that particular area of the code base.

Those 2 last points can also be interpreted as a consequence of having the community scattering on implementing "layers on top" rather than actually sharing the effort of the core parts. Seems like a vicious cycle now.
But it's not only the cause of contributors working at the wrong level, it can also often be the cause of the project team not really welcoming contributors and contributions. This is probably the biggest issue.

Frankly, the only one that is really trying is Lars and he admits that he does not know anything about the code base. He was the only one who cares about a patch I submitted to PDE weeks ago. Is this really the strategy?

FWIW, I see Eike has two reviews open with p2. Both opened 2014. No feedback. Nothing. So again, how do you want to motivate people fixing what and where it needs to be fixed?

For a project like PDE, which is on a high-level without much risk to break much downstream, the Eclipse PMC could be consulted and aknowledge the fact that the lack of resources requires nomination of new committers. As a response, the top #N (3 or 5 maybe) contributors on https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/eclipse.pde/who who aren't PDE committers should be nominated.
That could be enough to create a new era of PDE.

For p2, it's a bit more tricky as this is pretty difficult and dangerous code, so the strategy suggested above could be too risky. I've heard that Pascal would try to do more reviews soon and hopefully have some new contributors ready to make them committers.

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer for Red Hat Developers
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