There's a handful of technologies that are related to the Eclipse IDE that are not necessarily part of the simultaneous release.
I'm thinking of things like the:
- Eclipse Marketplace;
- Eclipse Babel (the open source project, the instance of it running on EF servers, and the language packs that it produces);
- User Storage service (the EF hosts the server, the Eclipse USS SDK project is part of the simultaneous release).
The Eclipse Foundation makes decisions regarding these services. I'm concerned that we have no current plans to modernise the Eclipse Marketplace, and am especially concerned that the Eclipse Foundation's webdev team are responsible for curation and maintenance of the content there).
It really feels to me like we don't really leverage the translations produced by Eclipse Babel. I experimented a few years ago with putting language packs into the Marketplace, but that never progressed beyond some initial tinkering.
The Eclipse Foundation provides most/all of the development resources for the USS SDK open source project and all of the development resources for the backend (including integration with Eclipse Marketplace). More importantly, the staff involved in standing up and maintaining these services make all of the decisions regarding them.
I might also be inclined to lump projects like Eclipse Orbit, Eclipse Tycho, Eclipse EBR, and other "support" projects that the simultaneous release depends heavily upon but are not strictly under the purview of the Eclipse IDE Working Group in general or the Planning Council in particular.
So... I guess that the agenda item is along the lines of "what are we going to do with this stuff?"
My expectation is that the steering committee is going to have opinions regarding whether or not we should continue to support the Eclipse Marketplace and Eclipse USS SDK. I believe that we need the Planning Council to take an oversight role in the Marketplace (I don't quite know what this means, but I'm pretty sure that it's wrong for EF staff to be making the decisions). I'd really like to have a read on how valuable folks think the Eclipse Babel Language packs actually are (and what we might consider recommending, if anything, that we do to promote their continued maintenance and distribution of language packs).
The Planning Council has an opportunity to present some recommendations regarding these services to the steering committee.
Wayne
