Europa + PDT + Subversive == happy wife

Yes this is a weird equation, but I can tell you that since I set my wife up with PDT and a few components from Europa, she is the happiest PHP developer around.
To my biggest surprise setting her up with an IDE doing PHP, subversion and remote exploration (these were her requirements) was really easy and the result worked well.

Here are the steps that I followed:

• Downloaded the eclipse SDK (who knows she may want to do plugin
  developement :-))
• Added the following URL to the list of update sites (this is because
  subversive and PDT are not part of Europa)
- http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/update-site/
- http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/

• Selected the previously added site and the Europa one, clicked next
• Once presented with the list of things to installed I picked:
- PDT Features
- Subversive SVN Team provider
- Remote Access and Device Development > Remote System Explorer End-User Runtime
- Remote Access and Device Development > Target Management Terminal

• Clicked "select required", clicked a few times next, accepted the license and after a few moments of download I was able to restart and get access to all these new functionality.

To be honest, and you know that I like to criticize, I was impressed by relative simplicity of the install and the maturity/quality of the components that I got. Currently my favorite one still is the remote system explorer.

Next step, setting her up with Mylyn for managing bugs.

Helpwanted

Marking bugs as "helpwanted" is fine and does capture the essence of the desire from a committer standpoint. However I believe this is not enough to engage with the community. Why? Because the codebase is huge and without knowledge of where to start, there is almost no chance for someone to succesfully help.
So what? If you, committer, really want help, you should give a few entry points in the code where to start investigating the problem and if you, community member, really want to help you should ask for those entry points.
In PDE/Build we have done that for a few things that we did not had cycle to fix and the feedback has been great. So why don't you try and see if it helps.

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.