Tools Project

Eclipse Tools PMC New Project Process

Tools PMC Project Creation Process

DRAFT

Overview

The mission of Eclipse Tools Project is to foster the creation of a wide variety of tools for the Eclipse Platform. The project provides a focal point for diverse tool builders to ensure the creation of best of breed tools for the platform. The Tools project provides a place where a single point for interaction and coordination for all tools developers can occur which will minimize overlap and duplication, ensure maximum sharing and creation of common components and promote seamless interoperation between the diverse types of developed tools. The project will promote the Eclipse vision and attempt to foster subprojects that set the “gold standard” for tools implementers.

This document describes the subproject creation process followed by the Eclipse Tools PMC. The Tools PMC, is managed under the The Eclipse Tools Project Charter. Part of the Tools PMC mandate is to search out new projects, and bring them into eclipse as first class, eclipse projects.

The process for new projects follows a straight forward sequence of steps.

  1. New proposals to PMC
  2. Initial PMC evaluation
  3. Project Review Committee Approval
  4. Public Creation
  5. Active project development

1) New Project Proposals

In general, project can come from many sources. These can be posted to the tools-dev mailing list, the newsgroups or email to the PMC for preliminary evaluation.

  1. proposals from the general eclipse community.
  2. proposals from member companies technology
  3. active recruitment of existing projects to eclipse.org

Once a project proposal has been PMC will have a series of discussion to review the the proposed project with the team proposing the project. Typically, a written proposal is submitted which describes the work, scope of the project and any information relevant to the creation of the open source project. You can find some previous proposals at www.eclipse.org/tools/proposals.

2) Initial PMC Evaluation: Criteria for acceptance of new projects

The PMC will perform a review of new project proposal and work with the proposals it receives. The Tools PMC decides if the project is in the scope for the Tools PMC. Projects must be consistent with the Tools PMC project charter and the Tools PMC Roadmap.

Once a project looks like it will be acceptable for the tools project, the first step is to inform the PRC about upcoming proposed projects. This is done by posting a brief description of the proposal to the PRC mailing list. This will result in some of the eclipse board membership requesting information and asking to be involved. Email annoucements may also be posted to various newsgroups and mailing lists which are relevant to the proposal.

The intent of this phase is to:

  • Gauge interest and participation
  • Locate alternative participants and possibly code bases for forming the project
  • If an alternate code base is being proposed, interested parties are asked to meet and come up with a common proposal.
  • Project leaders must understand that this may mean that they have to be prepared to work with someone elses code .

It is possible that the proposal is revised by the contributors which describes the work, as a result of this collaboration phase with other companies. It is better if multiple companies support a specific proposal. Co-proposals often indicate well supported plan.

3) Project Review Committee Evaluation

The Eclipse PRC works with a project creation process which appears here<missing link to PRC page>. After this phase, the PRC can decide to accept the project and allow its creation or request that the PMC work with the developers to improve the proposal.

4) Public Project Creation and Infrastructure

Once a subproject has been formed, the PMC will create the infrastructure for your project. For a detailed description of what this entails, see the PMC project infrastructure guide on project infrastructure details.

5) Project is Active, development starts

Congratulations, your project is active. Development activities rules are governed by the Tools PMC Charter.