We Don't Need Another Repo

Re Wayne's blog about an Eclipse.org Maven Repo:

EMF has had an undocumented/unmarketed Maven2 repo for about 4 years now.

All you need is to take an update site zip, unpack it, rearrange the folder structure, and rename the jars. Then you create little XML files called .poms to describe the jars in the tree, and Maven-aware tools can read the tree. It's fairly trivial. http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/emf/maven2/ is the URL, IIRC. About once every 2 years someone asks about our providing such a repo, and I give out the URL. Clearly not a huge demand for it.

One might argue that creation of such a folder structure is in the purview of Athena's publishing scripts, which today eases the process of copying your bits to download.eclipse.org, then unpacks your Update site so it can be scanned by p2 rather than downloaded as a single archive. It too is fairly trivial. I would not be adverse to converting my existing shell script for the EMF repo creation into a generic Ant script for use by Athena users.

Frankly though, I think it would be more valuable if the m2eclipse folks added support for reading/converting p2 repos. Publishing yet another file format would require another release-train-like workflow (we already have two: EPP and buckybuilder for Galileo) and more people maintain it. Even if every project published their own maven repo, we'd want for the sake of ease of use to aggregate them into a central place for easier navigation and discovery by maven tools. So, like with Ganymede, we'd have each project's bits copied to two places on disk for each build. (Galileo used composite repos to POINT at project repos rather than copying them saving tons of disk space and CPU cycles. AFAIK, Maven does not support this concept, but I could be wrong.)

There's also another benefit to having tooling to support converting from p2 repo to maven2 repo: the aggregate repo could be housed at apache.org and suck THEIR bandwidth and support resources instead. Thus just as Eclipse.org is upstream from Fedora's Eclipse project .rpms (which are upstream from Debian/Ubuntu's .debs), Eclipse.org p2 repos could be upstream from Apache's Maven repo(s). After all, Apache already collects maven artifacts for non-apache.org projects to facilitate the use and adoption of maven, so this is entirely in line with their standard operating procedures.

Thoughts?

Posted from Blackberry using Opera Mini, by the side of Shawnigan Lake, Vancouver Island, BC

My love-hate with SVN, Part 6: Installation Ease Of Use

For months I've been annoyed by the fact that installation of Subversive (or Subclipse) requires fetching features and plugins from 3 or more update sites. No more!

Today, as an exercise to learn how to use the <p2.mirror/> task and provide a reproduceable, offline way to get Subversive into a virtual machine, I've created an update site zip, complete with site.xml and p2 metadata, which can be used to install Subversive from a single source. Here's the Ant script if you'd like to try this at home.

Because let's be real: you can only complain so long before it's time to roll up your sleeves and pitch in, right? That's how open source survives - thanks to people who care enough to complain AND care enough to help.

Here's the 13M update site zip, which includes the following:

Subversive 0.7.8
SVN Connector 2.2.1
SVNKit 1.2.3
JNA 3.0.9
ECF 3.0.0

Any problems, please report them in bug 284077.

My love-hate with SVN, Part 5: Fedora 11 + Eclipse 3.5 + Subversion 1.6

Finally figured out how to make Eclipse 3.5 play nicely on Fedora 11 w/ Subversion, and I owe this bit of knowledge to our new MacPro. *sigh*

I also owe a great deal of gratitude to Cloudsmith for providing their Cloudsmith Galileo+ repository, which includes these features:

I still wish the version numbers would better align, in that I have to install the SVN Team Provider v0.7.8 with the SVN Connector v2.2.0 and the SVNKit 1.3.0 implementation v2.2.0 to make all this work with Subversion 1.6. Oof.

Workspace #fail

Another obscure and unhelpful error message that now pops up about once every five minutes while I'm working in Eclipse. Upgraded to Eclipse 3.5 a day before the official release (thanks to my Friends of Eclipse membership), but to no avail. Evidently my workspace is pooched somehow.

Why can't more error messages tell you *HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM*, rather than just reporting that something went wrong? Surely as software devs we should be able to do better... if for no better reason that to avoid having to listen to end users like myself complain? :P

P2: The Publisher

The publishment has begun [1].

Read all about this enhanced replacement for the Metadata Generator.

Work it, Baby, Work it!

Next Thursday, May 21 is the Toronto Demo Camp from 6:30-8:30 with refreshments thereafter. We haven't nailed down all the details yet (like the order of presentations or what food will be served), but I can safely say that barring any Canada Post mixups, there will be Eclipse golf shirts available to be won by those in attendance.

How do you win? Well, by presenting, of course! Sign up now!

The presentation format is flexible, and this is an informal event... so if you have 5 mins, 15 mins, or 30 mins of material, great! We'll provide the conference room, projector, whiteboards, and even a laptop if you provide the demo materials. The rest is up to you.

When signing up, please identify your name, topic & expected duration. Looking to strut your funky stuff and get some early adopters as you get close to the June release? Here's your chance.

No More Blue Balls

Just a quick note to let people know that I've updated the Eclipse Hudson instance (and you can too, if you're in the Hudson admin group!)

As part of this update, I've installed a plugin to make Hudson look more consistent with other CI tools:

I know it's generally not advisable to do potentially breaking changes like this on a Friday evening, but after a number of ups and downs this week, the Galileo BuckyBuilder is actually green (blue) ...

... and it's my last weekend as a 2⁵ year old, so out with a bang we go.

If I broke anyone's Hudson job w/ this update, let me know - I'll be checking mail over the weekend, just in case.

PDT News

Some quick announcements about the PHP Dev Tools project:

• PDT 2.0 now has all-in-one builds, which include all the requirements you need to get started w/ PDT for Linux, Mac, and Windows (all 32-bit). If you're on another platform, you can grab the Eclipse 3.4.1 Platform, or perhaps the Ganymede SR1 JEE bundle, and then add an update site. More...

• PDT 2.0RC2 is available, with RC3 this week and GA next week.

• Then, starting in 2009, PDT 2.1 will be on the Galileo release train. Note that as this will be an extra-short cycle (that is, one half the usual length) this release may not include any massive new features. Stay tuned -- the PDT 2.1 plan has not yet been published (because PDT 2.0 isn't out yet, of course).

• Interested in seeing a PHP Developer package, along with the C/C++ and Java ones? Vote for bug 238960.

• While so far rather quiet, there's a new #pdt IRC channel. Bear in mind these things take a while to get going, but they do grow in time. #eclipse-modeling is a perfect example. C'mon by and have a chat.

New & Noteworthy: Marketing Your Hard Work

There's been a lot of talk lately in cross-project-issues-dev@ (search for "must-do") about the relative merits of having a set of enforced rules for participation in the annual release train.

If you'd like to void an opinion, here's a poll.

Re: the requirement for more frequently updated New & Noteworthy documents, I'm amazed how many people object to being told they need to better market their projects. Really, that's all a N&N is -- a digest of what's important to convince people to upgrade to your latest efforts. (In Modeling we employ a mix of manually created copy & screenshots w/ automatically-generated lists of bugs closed by milestone, release or individual build.)

If project leaders & committers don't see value in writing marketing copy to showcase their efforts, then why do their employers see fit to pay for marketing/branding/sales people to sell their products? Given that sales people are driven by dollars, would they bother if it didn't work?

Bottom line: Believe in what you do, trust that it has value, and talk it up once in a while. Sure, it's effort, but it's worth it.