In the spirit of those “The More You Know,” commercials and my insatiable need to spread Eclipse knowledge, I want to talk about something cool I stumbled across recently. If you ever visited the EMF website (or any Eclipse Modeling related project) you may have noticed that there seems to be a nice consistency to all the download pages of the various components. There are also cool tools Release Notes. Imagine being able to see every bug that goes into a build, cool huh? There’s also something called Search CVS which allows you to search CVS commits quickly. Ideally, this is something I would like to see more Eclipse projects adopt, as having a unified download page along with some cool infrastructure around it is awesome. As a person who had the pleasure to work in release engineering for a short period of time, having a standard set of build scripts and infrastructure would help greatly (I mean, how many times can you write code that generates an RSS feed for builds… I mean… come on!). To do my part, I will at least make it easier to generate simple automated builds in the future.
Is a new project proposal in order, who knows, not sure how many interested parties are out there… Unfortunately, release engineering is one of those things people don’t care about until there’s a crisis. This is a bad attitude to take, as release engineering is completely critical to the success of a software project. It is the fundamental building block of ensuring the adoption of your project.
On the other hand (I have to admit), I have an ulterior motive in blogging about this, Nick Boldt has done some good work in this area particularly, and this is my way of getting him to blog more about his excellent work.