Old colleagues vs new colleagues

I'll let you guess which one I'm working for :)

Btw, the "I love p2" shirts will be available at the Sonatype booth and at my talk this afternoon.

Your p2 guide at eclipsecon

You can find below all the p2 related events at eclipsecon. Some of them are really focused on p2 while others are describing their usage of p2. Enjoy!

Monday:

From build to assembly to deployment: Using p2 to facilitate agile software development.

Use EMF and Equinox p2 to manage device development environment

Discovering the p2 API

Introduction to Eclipse b3

Building with Buckminster

Tuesday:

Managing P2 Repositories and Repository Interoperability with Nexus Professional

Eclipse in the Enterprise: Lessons from Google

p2 BOF

Wednesday:

Simplifying update and extension install for RCP applications

Moving on

At the end of the week I will be leaving IBM / OTI. I have truly been honored to be part of the Eclipse Platform team and through this experience redefine the IDE, deliver RCP, shape up Java componentry and perform many other stunts. It has been 7 fantastic years.

As hard as it is to leave, I'm very excited about the opportunity to join Sonatype [1] because they have an exciting portfolio of products [2] and a commitment to open source (Maven, m2eclipse, ...). Therefore I will continue to be heavily involved in the Eclipse community and provide leadership for the p2 project. I look forward to being a part of the Eclipse team from a new perspective and have no doubt that I will run into other members of the Eclipse team in the future.

[1] http://www.sonatype.com

[2] http://www.sonatype.com/people/2010/01/next-generation-maven-development-stack/

Those lying numbers

There are more than one way to contribute to open source projects. Unfortunately, eclipse dash only shows one aspect of it, the code; and even for this one aspect it does not capture the reality of things. Why is this? Dash counts CVS commit and this misses the key aspect of who authored the code.

So why am I getting to this today? Because people are using dash as the scarecrow on diversity, but I believe it does not represent the reality of each project. Here the case study of p2:

1% for Cloudsmith? 1% for EclipseSource? WTF? This does not look very diverse... Unfortunately these numbers shows exactly what I want: they are bogus. They do not represent the reality of the investment done by those two companies or the number of patches received by individuals. Indeed, Thomas H., Henrik L. and Ian B. have all been regular contributors to the project and know a lot of the code base. In fact I'm sure that if IBM was to pull the plug on the project it would carry on just fine (probably with even more freedom since I would be gone ). Their companies have products based on p2 (I believe this to be a sign of commitment for the size of p2), they come to every call, and are not afraid of taking on big issues, etc...

So why are the numbers so low?

• Patches committed for others. I have been committing a lot of patches either from the community or on behalf of Thomas H. Unfortunately this again inflate the IBM numbers to the detriment of Cloudsmith or "individuals".
• Lately the code has been very much in flux caused by a large refactoring (package rename, etc) which inflates the commit count and dilute others commits.
• Number of IBM committers. IBM has more committers than others on the project thus allowing for more code to be produced. However if those companies were to increase their number of participants (wink, wink) to a number equal to those of IBM, they would then be at par. Maybe should we compare the companies based on the average commit per committer (e.g commitCount / committer).

I'm sure that I'm missing other factors about why those numbers are so low, but you get the point... Though I recognize that almost every project would use a little more diversity, we have to be careful on how numbers are being used. If we want to use dash as a reliable hint on the activity and diversity, then we should revise how the numbers are being computed to take into account: patch author instead of committer, activity in bugs, activity on ML, number of ppl asking questions in forums, etc...