| [technology-pmc] Nexus Project or perhaps hosting micro-projects directly under Tools Project... |
|
Technology PMC, I am in the process of resuming work on Nexus Project
proposal and I would like to seek your input. The problem I am trying to solve is how to make Eclipse
Foundation friendlier to very small projects. These
“micro-projects” have two defining attributes: (1) their scope is
rather small (most will likely only support a few committers and in a lot of
cases as few as one) and (2) their scope is general enough to not make a good
fit in an existing project. These projects can be broken up into two broad
types: (1) frameworks that can be used by other Eclipse projects or the broader
ecosystem and (2) end-user functionality (recent examples: image viewer and
export editor contents as HTML). The idea is to create a new project (Nexus) under the Technology
Project to serve as an organizational point for managing these micro-projects.
The Nexus project lead and committers would be responsible for: 1. Maintaining project website with information about how to
go about creating a micro-project. 2. Promoting the idea that it’s now easier to create
small projects (both internally and externally). 3. Serving as first-review filter for incoming project
proposals. One important function would be identifying proposals whose scope
intersects too much with an existing project. 4. Possibly managing org.eclipse.nexus.* namespace under
which all Nexus sub-projects would belong (or we could let micro-projects use
top-level namespace if everyone was comfortable with that). 5. Monitoring health of existing micro-projects and
providing regular updates to Technology PMC. 6. Any necessary infrastructure (mostly build and
distribution). The goal is to free sub-projects from having to handle this on
their own. It’s likely that most of the needs will be addressed by the
new build service currently being developed at Foundation’s level, in
which case this is a catch-all for any remaining infrastructure work. Some have suggested that we don’t really need a
separate project for this function and that we could ask Technology PMC to
accept and manage such projects directly. I tend to think that this will not
scale effectively if we are successful in attracting large number of
micro-projects, but I’d like to know where Technology PMC members stand
on this. Thoughts? Comments? PS: There is an out-of-date wiki page (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Nexus_Project)
that I’ve used in the past to work on this project proposal. It
doesn’t reflect two important changes at the Foundation since the wiki
was lasted updated: (1) it is now possible to create arbitrary levels of
project nesting, so micro-projects can be actual projects rather than
components, and (2) there is an effort under way to provide a ready-to-use
build system directly from the Foundation. - Konstantin
|
