Dream or reality?

I know that I should not do software related stuffs until the last minute before going to bed, or otherwise I have a tormented night.
Unfortunately yesterday night I did not respect that... but instead of having a nightmare and I ended up having the sweet dream that fed up by the limitations of java, the eclipse team would set on a journey to develop java extensions making the development faster, the code smaller and faster, the extensibility easier, etc. It would contain blocks, partial classes, extension methods, ... and our productivity would be so boosted that we could release in February instead of June. Unfortunately that was only a dream but I swear that I'll read again those C# 3, Smalltalk, Scala or Traits papers before going to bed.
Should we make this dream reality?

Ps: By the way, in my dreams the extensions were producing regular java byte codes.

A fine polish item for the community

We (the equinox team), after a lengthy discussion, moved out of our bucket the bug 155897 into the UI one. This bug is about finding a way to expose to the end user which bundles are not resolved and why. Unfortunately the UI team is just overbooked. Therefore if you want to see this bug fixed, it is the right moment to step up and provide a patch for inclusion in M7.

Why can / should this item be addressed by the community?

• It is simple


• It is self contained, therefore not requiring an extensive knowledge about the system and thus limiting the risk of instability


• You will get gratitude from committers and other users.

So if you want to give this problem a try, please declare your interest in the bug report. Thanks in advance.

ORBIT is ready for prime time

Orbit is now ready for prime-time. However don't ask us to put in Orbit your favorite jar because Orbit is *not* a super general repository. As per the project charter you will only find in here the libraries that other eclipse projects need. In fact the creation of orbit stemmed from the problem experienced in Callisto where each projects had their own copy of common.logging and the like which created various problems.

So to summarize, if you are an eclipse project using third party libraries and you want to maintain your libraries in a central place, then Orbit is for you (platform, wtp, tptp and a few other projects already do that).

Now on some rectification from Alex post :
- "so no GPL or LGPL is allowed.": Of course, this is true of eclipse in general because of license compatibility issues.
- "and the bundles have a date qualifier (which then changes between the builds, even if the actual version of Xerces and the codebase remains the same)". Wrong. Orbit uses the same practice than the eclipse SDK when it comes to managing qualifiers. The qualifier is generated from the CVS tag and the output will not change from one build to another if the content of the project has not changed. For example, the javax.servlet bundle in orbit  S200703161546 , is the same than javax.servlet in orbit S200702082257.

Paving the road to a new update manager, the first block

I've finally sent the annoucement email mentionning the creation of the provisioning incubator. I'm disappointed that I could not sent it earlier to give people more time to see what is going on before eclipsecon, but the last minute hacking for our "cool stuffs in equinox" demo (wednesday morning 10am) lasted longer than I expected :-) Oh well....

Regrets aside, I'm really exited because this is a new start and I really hope that we will get some strong and valuable involvement/contribution from the community and also cross fertilization with EPP and Maya (hope to see some of those guys become committers on the provisioning since it will influence a lot what they are doing). In fact I personnaly believe it is the perfect opportunity since we are starting from scratch and all in the open. Ok it is not perfectly from scratch because I have already committed some code, but this is more a starting point for discussions and directions rather than being the final answer.

So now I'm off to finish my suitcase and other slides, and I hope to see you at the "provisioning, an update on update" bof wednesday night.