STP/Transition

The STP project is being subsumed by the SOA project, which contains both tools and runtime elements. What is happening here is one container project being exchanged for another: the projects that compose STP will in themselves not go away, just the STP 'container' that surrounds them.

Impact on Helios

There will be no impact on the Helios release train. The STP container project will continue to submit build contributions to Helios as it has done since train start. No new projects or project elements will be added. Looking into the future, Helios SR1 and SR2 will continue to be available from the same contribution stream. The Eclipse 3.7 release stream will be provisioned from the new SOA container project.

Impact on Communications Channels

The STP container project has four communications channels: website, wiki, newsgroup and twitter. The plan for the website is to put a redirect from eclipse.org/stp to eclipse.org/soa and to link the existing eclipse.org/stp content from the eclipse.org/soa home page. The expectation is that the individual projects will adjust their own web page information to be valid in the new container project.

The SOA container project does not use a wiki at this time, so no migration is planned. Instead a link to the STP wiki will be maintained from the SOA website. Another option would be to create a toplevel wiki page for the SOA container project and rename/move the STP component pages to live in that hierarchy.

A post to the STP newsgroup will inform subscribers to move their attention to the SOA newsgroup. We don't envisage shuttering the STP newsgroup in the short term as it can still be a resource for searching. After Eclipse 3.7 release, we can revisit this decision.

The STP twitter account is not that popular and can be safely discarded. It is mainly used for build notifications. Suggest that SOA uses a twitter channel more effectively.

Impact on APIs

There will be no impact on APIs in the Helios timeframe. Usual API compatibility rules will be observed for SR1 and SR2. Breaking API changes may become part of the Eclipse 3.7 release train and artifacts will be versioned appropriately to indicate this.

Impact on Architecture Council

Antoine Toulmé and Oliver Wolf are project members that are on the Architecture Council.

Impact on Planning Council

Oisín Hurley will remain on the Planning Council up to and including the Helios release. After it has shipped, he will resign and be replaced by a PMC member of the SOA top-level project.

Impact on EMO

The SOA PMC will need to work with the EMO to ensure that consistency is maintained in the Eclipse Foundation databases, that all necessary announcements and reviews are made and that any IPZilla entries are correctly migrated.

Impact on Webmaster

The SOA PMC will need to work with the Webmaster to ensure that all Bugzilla bug entries, milestones and components are correctly migrated.

Impact on Build Resources

It is envisaged that the SOA project will build its component parts on build.eclipse.org, using Hudson, just as the STP project has done. There will be a period of time (from Helios release to Eclipse 3.7) where STP and SOA builds will need to happen in parallel, although the STP builds will only be performed on code changes (i.e. there will be no weekly build).

Build requirements

The STP build system will remain in place for the delivery of the Helios, SR1 and SR2 projects. A number of proposals around the build environment and capabilities will be made in due time to the soa-pmc mailing list.