Disastrous experiment with Bugzilla

I don’t have much love for Bugzilla.
It got bitter just now when I tried this search on Google. I just looked for references of the word bpmn on bugs.eclipse.org, and the page returns no results.

In the same category, did you know the feeds created with Bugzilla aren’t working with Feedburner or Y!Pipes ? Google Reader has apparently implemented a hack to turn around the issue.

Back in 2001 (?), Bugzilla was a nice choice. Is it still the case ? Can we put up with a silo at one of the most critical places of our system ?

Is the EMO still looking for places to accelerate Eclipse ecosystem growth ? Look no further!

Babel: committer rights and updates

Hi,

I have just been voted a committer on the Babel project, and I’d like to thank the team for their warm welcome. Apparently, I fit right in as they didn’t have an Eclipse plugin developer on board just yet.

Right now, we are working on pushing for more translations of better quality, well delivered.

More translations:
I got way too much credit on this. Before, when you added a new version of a project, the previous translations were not translated. Now, they get migrated, and as a bonus, the translations from other projects that match your English string apply as well.

Better quality:
Kit made a critical improvement for the last release. It is now possible to run Eclipse with a dummy language that will show which strings are not translated correctly.

Most projects didn’t create their map files for 3.4 SR1. If you are an Eclipse project maintainer, and have changes in your translations for SR1, you might want to create the map files for this new version.

Also, map files may be missing information, or containing the test plugins that are not packaged in the final feature. I know Denis and Kit are actively working on making all those glitches go away. I think this question may be partly better addressed during delivery.

Right now, there is one global update site with a category per language. Each feature contains all the plugins of all the projects in a given language. At Intalio, we imagined a way to map the fragments to our plugins. I think p2 should be enhanced in this way to make this all work:
p2 should:
-make a list of all the plugins installed.
-install all the fragments present on the update site matching the plugins.
-create a feature on the fly matching the downloaded fragments.

What do you think of this proposal ? Is it a goal worth pursuing ?

“La cerise sur le gateau” would be to have p2 run this either inside Eclipse or headless, so we can create localized EPPs.

By the way, this begs the question of why we need features in the first place. Thoughts ?

My first screencast: export a project in Eclipse

I just created my first screencast. It is meant to help our users export their projects properly in an Eclipse environment.

The quality is not perfect, I will work on that for the next ones.

You can find this screencast on the Intalio community website.

UPDATE: I have moved from embedding a single screencast to using a Youtube playlist. I have updated this page with the embedded playlist. Have fun!

How git can help Eclipse.

This blog post is more or less a copy paste of the investigation and formulation work Assaf did for Buildr.

First, I’l take for given Eclipse is not moving away from CVS anytime soon. This post is not about replacing CVS for git.

In that context I still think git can help with Eclipse, and here is how:

git integrates well with CVS. You can clone a CVS repository, work in your git repository for some time, and commit back to CVS after a while.

We could easily imagine that some Eclipse committers would choose to use that development method for themselves. For example, you have a critical modification to do that would mess up the CVS trunk for a week. Your working copy may be a git repository over which you can branch as much as you want and that you can share with other committers.

Now, if you take a step back, you don’t have to keep that for committers only. You could even generalize that to contributors.

Here is what would be the process:
1. I am not happy about something, and I open a bug about it.
2. After some discussions, it becomes obvious there’ll be a need for a patch.
3. I fork the project into a git repository, and I make it publicly available to people.
4. I and others work on the patch.
5. The patch is ready and is attached back to the bug, and we do the IP legal work with the contributors.

Do you think Eclipse could offer a space for hosting git repositories ?

If you are interested into getting free hosting of git, look up github for example.

Your comments and reactions are most welcome.