PDE/Incubator/b3/WishList

Wish List

If you have wishes about B3 - requirements, ideas etc. Please post a comment on this wiki page. Also, if you are interested in working on some area of B3, let us know.

Ideas

• It would be super nice if there were a built-in dependency analyzer so that one could find the root plugin issues easily. As it is, if you have a bad dependency you get the whole tree and you have to walk the tree by hand to find out the root cause. Overall I think this is another demonstration of the ultimate weakness of the standard build systems out there. They are by nature linear (batch) approaches and so usually you can't do post hoc or inline analysis of issues. There is no semantic information in logs! You end up having to parse them back if you want to do any useful analysis. In a parallel lifetime, I would love to work on a simple semantic logging system that would allow structured analysis of this sort. (source http://milesparker.blogspot.com/2009/09/return-to-athena.html)
• Here is something else that I would love to do given time. The map files are pretty well structured - it would be nice to whip up a quick XText editor that would at least check syntax and more ambitiously provide a mechanism for hooking in semantic checks -- wouldn't it be nice if you could check that that SVN url is correct while editing the map file itself?! (source http://milesparker.blogspot.com/2009/09/return-to-athena.html)
• The Eclipse File System should be used as much as possible, thereby making it easy to access different types of locations (other than just files in your filesystem). This could for instance be used to publish results to a ftp based file system or similar. (Henrik).
• Earlier, people have commented on that they would like to be able to author "build actions" more conveniently that having to write ANT scripts. (Henrik)
• Good integration with ANT is important, as someone using b3 should be able to integrate existing build-scripts in ANT. (Henrik)

• I wish for a better name. Since we're combining the best of Buckminster, Maven, Athena, and PDE (4 systems), why not go with b4 instead of b3? Or something less "letter+number"-ish? I think the shark jump happened here after p2, e4, and 3mf. Surely we can brand this better?