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Planning Council/April 06 2011
Contents
Logistics
| Meeting Title: | Planning Council Conference Call |
| Date & Time: | Wednesday, April 06, 2011, at 1200 Eastern |
| Dial-in: | For the call-in numbers, see the "Project Review" number on Foundation Portal page. |
Members and Attendees
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Note: "Inactive" refers to Strategic Members we have not heard from in a year or so, and have been unable to convince to participate. Those members can become active again at any time. Contact David Williams if questions.
Note: feel free to correct any errors/omissions in above attendance record.
Y = Yes, attended
N = No, did not
R = regrets sent ahead of time
X = not expected
Announcements
- Welcome "new" member Doug Schaefer ... new representative of Tools PMC.
Indigo Status
- On track for M7?
Name Indigo +1
- Name that release; Indigo+1. And the winner is ... Juno. Pending EMO Review.
- And, as of Tuesday, April 5, it is still "pending review".
Eclipse 4.2 vs. 3.8 for Juno
We need to come up with a "proposed plan" for Eclipse Projects and members to evaluate. With their feedback, our proposed plan can become our initial plan, and it, in turn, become our final plan.
During this meeting, I'd like to get feedback on this proposal, to see if it is ready to "publish" for further feedback from the community. I realize that many of you will need more detailed meetings with the projects you represent and/or member companies to see if this plan is reasonable. It will help those discussions if there is a concrete proposal.
(See also notes from previous meeting.)
Proposal
For Juno, Eclipse 4.2 will be the primary workbench, but all (participating) projects will support and maintain a 3.8 based deliverable.
'Primary workbench' means Eclipse 4.2 will be the primary workbench that (participating) projects build against, and test, and will be provided in the common repository, and EPP packages. In all cases, "4.2" means "4.2 plus compatibility layer". That is, no one is expected to split streams, use 4.2 workbench "native" or exploit anything specific to 4.2. Of course, projects can if they want to (within the Assumptions, below) but there is no requirement to exploit 4.2 directly and probably better if low level projects do not.
'Support and maintain a 3.8 based deliverables' means that (participating) projects, at a minimum, agree to continue to provide a deliverable that can be used with 3.8 workbench. In most cases, we hope, this is the exact same deliverable used for the 4.2 based deliverable. This would be true for projects that do not use 4.2 specific API and simply rely on the compatibility layer. But for projects that want to exploit something new in 4.2 workbench ... that is split streams and have one specific to the 4.2 workbench prereq ... then they would still be expected to provide something adopters or upstream projects could use for 3.8-based installs. When there are two separate deliverables, the 3.8-based maintenance version might simply be Indigo SR2, at a minimum. But, even then, there might be cases where versions ranges have to be adjusted, or bugs fixed due to changes in 3.8 (since Indigo SR2 will be built and tested with Eclipse 3.7.2). Those are the minimum assumed deliverables. Naturally, projects may do more if they have desire or reason to, but the goal is to allow adopters an extended "transition" period to 4.x, if needed, where things will still work, in some form, using 3.8 based prereqs. For projects that do have "two deliverables", the 3.8 based one would be available on their own download sites and their own project's software site repositories, not the common repository.
Assumptions
While we want to allow projects to split streams, if they need to do so to exploit some new feature in Eclipse 4.x, we assume no "low level" projects introduce split streams that would require all dependent projects above them to also split streams. This could easily lead to "double work" for many people, which is not practical.
Plan roll-out and point of no return
We need to follow a process of evaluating this proposal, making sure there are no "blockers" that prevent it becoming our final plan.
The first step will be to "publish" this plan for feedback. If, or once, we agree on wording, I'll send note to cross-project list and remind people to talk to their Planning Council representative if they have comments or suggestions on the plan. We'll incorporate feedback received, from projects, or adopters, in our May meeting and then again in our June meeting. At that point, we'll consider our "proposed plan" to be our "initial plan".
To move from "initial plan" to "final plan", we will simply follow our plan and re-evaluate each milestone of Juno, that is for M1, M2, M3, and M4. Naturally, we expect confidence to grow incrementally each milestone, but M4 (in mid-December) will be assumed to be the point of no return. If no issues are found that prohibit this "4.2 is primary" plan, then it will be considered final after M4, mid-December, 2011 (which is the normal time for the "final plans" for our yearly June releases). This cycle differs a little from previous cycles, since it assumes projects and adopters do plenty of early testing with those early milestones (and/or early 3.8 based installs) to make sure it is a valid plan fulfilling their needs. Typically, many projects will be busy with Indigo maintenance during this same period of time, so it does take some commitment to also do the early Juno work if there are any concerns about implementing this plan.
Discussion during meeting
It was acknowledge that we don't necessarily know how to tell project the best way to accomplish the goals of "joint support" ... for example, some might want to build against 3.8 to make sure they do not accidentally pull in 4.2 APIs, for example. It (probably) depends on where each project wants to put the focus, but it is mostly up to the project ... that is, we do not want to dictate how to do things, just what the goals are ... but, if we come up with better suggestions, or concrete how-to advise, we should mentor the projects if it would make things easier.
It was mentioned that projects can split streams, without requiring dependent projects to split streams (that is, their API would stay the same). This might increase testing use-cases but would not "double" the work. I'll reword "assumptions".
It was mentioned the proposal seems to say "4.2 is primary" but "we discourage taking advantage 4.2's new capabilities". Especially in light of "split streams do not necessarily propagate", I'll reword.
Ed didn't know if "EMF Edit UI" needed to be split stream, or not ... will have to investigate.
Mic reports that Mylyn will have to split stream for some of their bundles, since they use UI internals, but this would not effect their APIs, so would not mean adopters, that use Mylyn APIs, would have to split streams.
Given that 4.2 is "primary" and used in repository and EPP packages, what is the nature of the "support 3.8" requirement? It would not make sense to say "ok, you can not be in 4.2 based repository, since you do not support 3.8". Hence, 3.8 support is a "should do" ... a strongly suggested should-do. With strong emphasis on "tell us explicitly if you can not". While adopters could always (probably) simply use Helios SR2 based bundles in their adopting project or products ... but,, the expectation would be that any bugs open preventing that kind of use would be accepted as valid. (For examples, if someone has an overly narrow version pre-req version range).
Put another way, since 3.8 not used in repo, or EPP packages, it would be hard to know if someone was not maintaining 3.8 compatibility ... would only show up from adopters or users that were "building their own" 3.8 based installs. That might be a reason or advantage of setting up some "test builds" to produce a 3.8 based repository ... even if not "delivered" or formally used, it would spot incompatibility issues early, at least. This would also be a value-add service to those adopters that needed 3.8 based builds, since then there would exist a "specification" of what goes into a 3.8 based build. Hopefully could be done with some sort of "incremental" build files, so only differences would have to be listed.
One request for May or June PC meetings is to list known cases, of who plans to split stream, or knows they'd have to. Many projects should already be known, since preliminary work with 4.1 has been going on.
There as a general consensus on the importance of the objectives, that is, the importance of supporting both streams, but at the same time a general feeling that "it sure seems complicated" and is unknown what issues might arise.
Juno Dates
These are our proposed dates for Juno deliverables. They follow same "pattern" as previous years. Any issues? Discussion? If not, the milestone dates will be forthcoming, also following pattern from previous years.
- Release: June 27, 2012 (fourth Wednesday)
- SR1: September 28, 2012 (fourth Friday)
- SR2: February 22, 2013 (fourth Friday)
These dates were agreed to. It was pointed out that this is what the community would expect, and since one of the oft mentioned strong points of Eclipse is its predictability, we would want a really important reason to deviate
Next Meeting
- May 4, 2011 (our regular "first Wednesday" meeting, at Noon Eastern).