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[buckminster-dev] IP-issues and hosting
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Hi,
Eclipse.org has fairly stringent policies about what can be published.
Everything has to pass through their IP-review process. During the work
incorporating the native Maven binaries this has become a very apparent
problem.
Problem 1.
We think that people working on the Maven code-base are best suited to
author and maintain the Buckminster Maven plug-in but since they are not
committers, everything they do must be submitted in the forms of patches
to bugzillas. Any such patch that exceeds 250 lines of code must go
through an IP-review.
Problem 2.
Everything that the new Maven bundle will depend on (transitively) must
also be IP approved. That means every single line of source that leads
up to the Maven binaries must be scanned. Eclipsed.org will only scan
proper releases. Understandable since scanning snapshots would make an
already heavy workload overwhelming.
Problem 3.
Open source software relies heavily on the fact that a large user
community will test beta-software. Given the problems 1 and 2, it will
be impossible for us to publish something that doesn't contain proper
releases of third-party binaries at Eclipse.org and the time between
when a user reports a bug and we can publish a new version of the
feature will be very long (two weeks or more). So we get a catch-22
situation.
A possible solution?
I think I might have a solution for this and I want your opinion. Here's
what I think we could do:
1. Move the code-base for a bundle such as org.eclipse.buckminster.maven
to a host outside of Eclipse.org. Ideally to the same repository where
the code that it's dependent on is hosted.
2. Publish a feature that contains this bundle and its dependencies on
an update site at a public host. The feature would depend on a core
Buckminster installation.
3. Publish a copy of the public feature at Eclipse.org without
physically publishing its dependent bundles. Those bundles are instead
fetched from the public host using the site.xml archive element. This
copy would be maintained by a Buckminster committer at Eclipse.org and
be subject to IP.
The user would not notice a difference.
From a development perspective, I think this would make things a lot
easier. No more patches going into the Buckminster Bugzilla unless API
changes are needed to the Buckminster core features. Patches going in
the other direction could also be avoided if a Buckminster team member
had committer rights to the remote repository.
What do you (the Maven people in particular) think about this?
Regards,
Thomas Hallgren