CDT/summitecon2013

CDT Summit at EclipseCon 2013

A one-day CDT summit was held at EclipseCon 2013 in Boston, MA, on Thursday the 28th of March, 2013.

EclipseCon information is here: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2013/

Open to all, even if you didn't sign up :).

Time: 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Room: Beacon Hill 2 & 3

Planned Attendees and Interests

1. Marc Khouzam - Ericsson
   • Debug, Multicore, Visualizer
2. Martin Oberhuber - WindRiver
   • Quality, Debug (TCF), Usability, Remote Edit-compile-debug
3. Sergey Prigogin - Google
   • Refactoring, C++11 features, Codan
4. Glen Anderson - Analog Devices
   • Debug, Usability, Multicore
5. Dominique Toupin - Ericsson
6. Josh Kruck
   • Debug (DSF, MS), Refactoring
7. Bill Swanson - Tilera
   • Visualization, Multicore, Eclipse/CDT Redistribution
8. Doug Schaefer - QNX
   • Everything, but currently working on improving Qt support
   • Also if we don't get many more people, we can meeting in one of the evenings as well
9. Jeff Johnston - RedHat
10. Jim Adams - Analog Devices
11. Reibert Arbring - Ericsson
12. Norman Yee - Analog Devices
13. Leo Treggiari - Intel
14. Vladimir Prus - Mentor Graphics
15. Eric Cloninger - Klocwork
    • Static analysis, refactoring, Android
16. Mike Wrighton - Mentor Graphics
17. Greg Watson - IBM
18. Brian Watt - IBM
19. Teodor Madan - Freescale
20. Jesper Eskilson - IAR Systems
    • MBS, TCF, indexer
21. Patrick Tasse - Ericsson

Proposed Agenda

• Eclipse 4.x discussion:
  • reactions to 4.x platform
  • CDT compatibility and/or upgrade plans
  • effect on other projects, Visualizer, etc.
    (e.g. if CDT retains 3.x compatibility, related plugins may need to as well)

• Java 7

• Advertising new CDT features
  • Dialog popup with "Did you know?" and "Don't show this message again"
  • Other?

• UI Junit tests: Dependency injection vs other CDT UI test techniques

• Debug
  • Quick Launches (Local C/C++ App, Remote C/C++ App)
  • Multiprocess launch

• Remote/synchronized projects

• ...

Minutes

• Introductions
  • 25 attendees from 14 companies
  • 7 CDT Committers present as well as 3 Linux Tools committers

• E4
  • What is the gain to start using E4 APIs?
    • Easier to modify the look of the UI -- No need to move CDT to E4 for that
    • Uniformity of the look and feel -- No need to move CDT to E4 for that
    • QNX feels the UI must be improved -- Does that require E4?
    • Once the CDT community agrees we can use E4 APIs, the decision to do so can be left to individual committers. There does not seem to be a reason we'd have to move all of CDT. We can instead take a joint E4 and 3.x approach.
  • Is there a reason to avoid all use of E4 APIs?
    • We want to keep CDT compiling on 3.x
    • We can re-discuss this requirement for the Luna release

• Can CDT support platform -1? Meaning the new CDT with the older platform.
  • CDT 8.2 is the first CDT that will allow that. It was not a conscious decision. We don't expect we we will be able, or want to enforce this.

• Java 7
  • We'll consider moving to Java 7 when the need arises

• Web integration in Eclipse
  • It is a mess and needs platform involvement. They are well aware of the problems.

• Advertising new CDT features
  • Welcome page
    • Probably already does all it can. But we have to make sure it points to a the latest wiki N&N or a migration of it.
  • N&N is very important
  • We need to keep the CDT website up to date and describing feature
  • We need auto-discovery of features. For example, people may have upgraded to CDT automatically and therefore will not know to look at the N&N
    • Mylyn has some active pop-up feature for just that purpose. CDT should look into it and copy it.
    • We will need to define policies
  • Can we leverage the splash screen to show the user some feature description when they are just staring at the screen.
    • This is a great idea!
    • Different images can be randomly shown
    • This must be package based (EPP)
    • As for vendors, it will be up to them to re-use this ability or not
  • Dialog popup with "Did you know?" and "Don't show this message again"
    • Not a user-friendly solution

• Redistribution of CDT
  • Maven/Tycho is the way to go

Decisions

• E4
  • CDT 8.2 (Kepler) will not use any E4 APIs to keep compatibility with 3.x.
  • CDT will not commit to supporting 3.x as a platform for the CDT 8.2 release.
  • For the future CDT release (Luna), the decision with regards to using E4 APIs is not taken yet. It will be discussed further after the Kepler release.
• Java
  • CDT 8.2 (Kepler) will run on Java 6
  • No decision to move to Java 7 for the next release at this time.