France 7 - Italy 0

Italy can have all the word cup they want, but they still don't have a committer in the SDK whereas France is strongly represented with 7 active people and 4 retirees :-)
Congrats for the cup Italy.

Setting the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment

In 3.2, each bundle included in the Eclipse SDK got its "required execution environments" set.
The two main motivations were:

• Carefully controlling the set of APIs we use from the JRE and reduce our dependencies
• Express in an API way the fact that some bundles could run on lower configurations than the one recommended by the platform (for example SWT and OSGi can run on foundation)
  

By doing that we also got some added benefits:

• At runtime, bundles that do not qualify to run on the VM will not run (for example bundles requiring java 5 will not resolve on a 1.4 VM)
• At build time, PDE Build will set the compilation flags for you and make use of the proper class library (see PDE Build help).
  

So if you write your bundle using java 5 feature, want to manage your JRE dependencies or simply want to do it the platform way, set the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment in your manifest.mf. Check out the wiki for the details.

Callisto

Earlier today, like a few others I was at the foundation and I actually saw Denis putting the final touch to callisto. That was really cool and exciting since it represented for us 'the' last final step to make our work available to everybody.
Thanks again Denis, Matt and Nathan for bearing with us in your office while we were drinking your beers and watching you work.
By the way next time, get one of those to make the final push more exiting :-).

Release party at the foundation?

Rumor has been growing that once Denis will have released the eclipse bytes to an ecstatic crowd all hyped up by the Ian's press releases, the foundation will host a release party where we can all watch the eclipse servers and the committers go red.