Difference between revisions of "Architecture Council/Meetings/March 10 2016"

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Face-to-face meeting at EclipseCon 2016 (Joint with the Planning Council)

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday Feb 11, 2016 at 1100 Ottawa HTML | iCal
Dial-in:	Let's use the Foundation's Asterisk setup for this call: North America (toll free) 1-866-569-4992 Germany (local call anywhere in Germany) 49-692-2224-6059 France (local call anywhere in France) 33-17-070-8535 Switzerland (local call anywhere in Switzerland) +41-44-580-2115 Spain, Sweden, others - see Asterisk/Numbers Participant conference extension: 701 then enter pin: 51968 SIP clients can call 701@asterisk.eclipse.org, then enter pin 51968.

Attendees

All AC Members are invited.

• PMC Reps please confirm attendance or list your delegate below. Every PMC is required to name a primary and backup delegate, and to ensure that one delegate attends the meeting.

All Attendees

• In attendance: Wayne Beaton, Denis Roy, Doug Schaefer, Eike Stepper, Martin Lippert, Alexsander Kurtakov, Jay Billings, Maximilian Kögel, Eike Stepper, Ed Merks, Gunnar Wagenknecht, David Williams, Ian Bull, Marcel Bruch
• Regrets:

Agenda / Notes

1. FEEP Overview (Paul White)
2. Every Detail Matters for the Neon Release
3. AC/PC help with The Great Fixes programme
4. Neon Release Status (David?)
5. Project Mentoring is broken. What do we do about it?
6. Impact of Eclipse Che
7. Typical existential discussion

FEEP

Paul White started the meeting with a status report on FEEP.

• We can only do as much work as there are funds available.
  • We've been receiving a steady stream of donations (consistent year over year)
  • ~$125K from last year's donations
• Hired (moved) Mikael Barbero into development role.
  • Technical leader, but will do some development
  • Prioritize work
  • Point of contact for contractors
• (Ed) Suggested that we let the community vote with dollars
  • (Paul) There are some challenges with this approach; we haven't explored this yet
  • Need to learn lessons from other orgs
• FEEP work is staffed by Paul, Mike, Mikael, and Wayne
• FEEP work done/in-progress
  • Ed worked on improving start up times
  • Obeo is working on autosave
  • Fabio is working on dark theme
  • Patrick Suzzi is doing bug triage for the platform
    • Will fix low-hanging fruit, validate bugs, close bugs that need to be closed, etc.
• (Ian) Will FEEP money go to the entire commit chain?
  • (Paul) No (not necessarily)
  • (Doug) FEEP funding is no more special than an employer paying you to contribute

First technical discussion of the day:

• (Ed) Dark theme just can't work. Technically not possible.
  • Must wrestle with SWT Platform fidelity.
  • Technical challenges are daunting
• (Paul) People are trying to use it
  • Message that we're trying to send is to move it forward
• (Eike) We (collectively) need to create a document that describes how to do theming

Every Detail Matters

Wayne learned about the Bugzilla Dependency Tree feature, and it is awesome.

e.g. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/showdependencytree.cgi?id=484444&hide_resolved=1

• We have a tendency to ship our organization
  • Preferences, views, etc. tend to be grouped by project; this is how we think, not how our users think.
    • e.g. Oomph has JRE-related preferences pages that probably should be grouped with other "JDT" pages.

We need to put more focus on the user.

• New Welcome page
  • New and Noteworthy on welcome page
  • Tips and tricks on welcome page

We've upgraded the /user page

• Added an alias from /support

We discussed the creation of a user-focused FAQ

• We have many FAQs spread all around. None are focused specifically on the user.
  • (Wayne) let's create a user-focused FAQ and link to it from the /downloads and /user (/support) page.
  • e.g. Error code 13
• Some push-back. Do we need to create yet another source of FAQ?
  • Maybe provide links to vetted Stack Overflow questions

What can we do about Error Code 13?

• Can we upgrade the launcher to do a better job?
  • Launcher should do more to help
• Some discussion around the location of the source and how to build the launcher
  • (Denis) we investigated pulling this into the CBI build, but didn't complete the work.
  • Ran in to challenges trying to build the launcher.
• Can we use FEEP money for this?

We should move Oomph launcher improvements into the launcher.

Mac Install experience is poor

• We need a proper native Mac DMG installer
• (I can't remember who said this) "Does the Mac really matter?"
  • I believe that the answer was yes and that this is worth some investigation.

We should ship a JRE

• Times have changed and it may actually be possible.
• What do we ship? JRE vs. JDK
  • Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers only needs a JRE
  • Unless you then install JDT, then you want a JDK
  • Installer only needs JRE (and we may be able to significantly trim the size with Java 9)
• Make it easier for the user to install JDKs

Great Fixes

We're going to change the tone from last year. Rather than trying to use the program to encourage contribution, use it to recognise those that have made significant contributions. We'll use this as part of the marketing for Neon.

• There's no evidence to suggest that the programme increased the rate of contribution last year.
• List of candidates pulled directly out of the Git commit record
  • Work-in-progress: https://www.eclipse.org/projects/greatfix/2016.php (not currently appropriate for general dissemination)
  • Commits are weighted based on the FEEP work priority list created by the Architecture Council.
• Includes:
  • Only commits made since June 24/2016 (Wayne recognizes that the start of "Neon" commits is fuzzy)
  • Only commits to "IDE" projects are included in the list (Platform, JDT, PDE, Web Tools, CDT, PDT, EGit, JGit, Recommenders).
  • Only those commits made while the individual was not a committer are included.
  • Commits made by AC/PC members are excluded.
  • Last year's winners are excluded
• Everybody gets a t-shirt

Neon

David gave a brief overview of the status of Neon.

• Four releases with Neon instead (one more than previous releases)
• Moving b3 aggregator into CBI
• Moving Simultaneous Release reports generator into CBI
  • Make more generally useful.

Mentoring

(Wayne) Mentoring is broken

• Virtually all mentors are absent
  • Most are responsive to requests, but...
    • Not all are subscribed to project mailing lists
    • Project teams often don't have a means of contacting mentors
    • Project teams often don't know that they need to contact mentors
  • Virtually no mentors actively engage their projects
• Wayne copies mentors on all outgoing communication to new project leads
• It is getting more and more difficult to find mentors
• Project teams need guidance
  • e.g. project team that doesn't understand open source may not even be working in the open. We need a means of identifying these projects and providing assistance.
• Wayne will be hiring an assistant who will poke new projects regularly to ensure that they're progressing.
  • Assistant will engage with Wayne and project mentor as necessary
• New incubation mailing list is established, but uptake is slow
  • EF staff are redirecting questions to the list to seed conversation.
• Wayne has started hosting new project orientation sessions.

We need to seriously re-evaluate mentoring and sort out means of making it work better.

Che

Che was presented during the keynote as the "Next Generation"

• Serious concern that this message hurts the desktop IDE
  • Re-enforces the notion that it is seen as a "dinosaur"

Many AC members had challenges installing Che. Generally related to getting the Docker configuration right.

AC Membership Requirements

(Wayne) is being a committer a requirement for nomination to the Architecture Council?

• General consensus is that yes, you need to be a committer before being asked to join the AC.

Role of the PMC

(Gunnar) Eclipse PMC is the only PMC that really acts according to the definition of a PMC in the EDP.

(Doug) Tools PMC requires that a second person look at CQs.

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council/Meetings/April 14 2016