Hi technology-pmc,
If this reads a bit like a rant, please excuse. It's not. Its
intent is to get one or two ideas how to improve the current
situation.
I'm just back from a research conference and have been asked
by a bunch of researchers how potential collaborations with
Eclipse and Code Recommenders in particular could look like. The
scope of these works varies from applying Natural Language
processing (NLP) on documentation, bringing NLP into code
completion, integrating Code Recommenders into Code Bubbles,
developing a parameter guessing recommender, collaborations on
code search engines, mining on user interactions, and generally
extending the idea of IDE 2.0 for lots of other ideas.
I don't think that many of these ideas will actually turn
into code at
eclipse.org but if a few
projects or ideas will do so, it would be a great success.
I wonder whether Eclipse could do more to get more research
ideas into Eclipse and provide them a platform for their work.
In my opinion putting something into the marketplace is not
enough - research people don't get the feeling that they have a
huge outreach there. Can't we do a little more that they get the
feeling of being "part of Eclipse" rather than "yet another
research prototype using Eclipse"?
Or can we lower the entrance barrier for research at Eclipse?
I know that
eclipselabs.org was (also)
designed for this case, but do they work as expected? And: is
providing a repository a useful support? What distinguishes it
from SourceForge or GitHub? I think these research projects
should be coupled more to existing Eclipse projects; they should
be treated more like incubators with associated (top-level?)
projects giving them a platform for instance with an aggregator
update site, blog posts etc.
Also, projects still have to provide the whole infrastructure
like a build server, a web server etc. on their own. We, for
instance, have a shadow infrastructure with Bugzilla, Gerrit,
Jenkins etc. running at the university from the first days which
was a huge invest we had to make upfront. And at the end
everything still stays in the university network. This doesn't
feel like open source then and such a huge support from my (very
personal) viewpoint.
A few thoughts on whether or how we can change some things a
little would be great. I hope the technology-pmc list is
appropriate for this as I'm only hoping for some small changes
inside technology top-level project but not for changes in the
Eclipse bylaws ;) But maybe this should just go to the
foundation. If so, I hope Wayne is listening.
Thanks,
Marcel
P.S.: I know the discussions about "researchers
want to publish papers and don't want to support
tools for long time". This is not the direction I
would like to take in this post. It's about
simplifying the process iff someone wants to go a
few steps further - like we did with recommenders.
It just doesn't need to be that hard as it was for
us.
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