Dunge: Hello there, sorry for the noob question. I installed Eclipse for Java (Helios) and JDK update 21, I’m trying to use the Blackberry SDK but when I install it it say I require org.eclipse.jdt.debug [3.5.0,3.6.0) first. I tried to find it in “install new software” or on the website, I can’t find anything
rcjsuen: Dunge: That BB plug-in wants Galileo not Helios.
rcjsuen: “require org.eclipse.jdt.debug [3.5.0,3.6.0)”
rcjsuen: Dunge: 3.5.x corresponds to Galileo, 3.6.x corresponds to Helios
Dunge: rcjsuen : you say 3.6.x for Helios, and they actually write 3.6.0 in the required message, so why should I revert to 3.5.0?
rcjsuen: Dunge: You must not have taken Calculus, or forgot about it.
rcjsuen: [x,y) means x inclusive, y exclusive
rcjsuen: i.e. 3.5.0 <= x < 3.6.0
Dunge: should be [x,y[
rcjsuen: Dunge: I’ve never seen that notation. Where do they do that?
Dunge: I just though it was a typo
Dunge: hmm in my math classes? :)
rcjsuen: [x,y[?
Dunge: yeah
rcjsuen: Dunge: And where do you live? That’s what I meant. :)
Dunge: lol
rcjsuen: Dunge: I am interested in where they use this notation, hence I asked.
Dunge: I just asked the guy next to me and he’s saying it should be a [ too
Dunge: I’m in Quebec
rcjsuen: ah
rcjsuen: in the States they used this
rcjsuen: and I went to U Waterloo, we used that there too
Dunge: but I though it was a global notation
rcjsuen: I shall ask other ppl when I get back to Ottawa on Sunday :)
rcjsuen: Maybe that is what they use in France/Europe?
njbartlett: rcjsuen: Possibly France, but certainly not other bits of Europe
rcjsuen: That notation seems to be part of the ISO anyway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31-11#Sets
rcjsuen: Very interesting. You learn something new every day as I always say. :)
njbartlett: Indeed, very interesting.
rcjsuen: njbartlett: So I think we need language packs for fr_FR that uses different notation. :)
njbartlett: I’ve given talks about OSGi in lots of countries, almost everywhere there’s at least one or two maths geeks who nods quietly when they see [,)
rcjsuen: hahahaha

When someone asks you “What is Helios?” or any one of those other release train names, how do you respond? It is a question that comes up on IRC pretty often.

In the past I’ve said something like “it’s a code name” but that’s a pretty bad answer when I think about it so I’ve been trying to remind myself not to answer it that way. I’ve also called it a “marketing term” before, noting that it’s a way of grouping/naming a bunch of different projects’ releases together, but that seems wrong too.

So, I ask you, good reader, how would you describe the (name of the) release train in layman’s terms? Please try to keep your answer limited to one or two sentences as I would like to write up a short and simple entry for our IRC FAQ (that nobody reads).

I’ve actually been meaning to post this question for a while but I just couldn’t quite whip up the willpower to blog about it. However, after seeing bug 319068 fly by, I think it’s about time I asked the community.

Actually, I’m not sure if that’s really a good analogy or not, but anyway…

opafan48: i have an issue with eclipse, i cant stand its connection to ibm, thats why i try to mind it.. how would u deal with this issue?
rcjsuen: opafan48: Eh?
rcjsuen: opafan48: Could you rephrase that?
rcjsuen: opafan48: You mean you don’t like the fact that IBM has people working on it?
opafan48: rcjsuen, not exactly, i dont like its origin.. which is as far as i read is in ibm..
rcjsuen: Well, there’s nothing you can do about it.
rcjsuen: That’s like saying
rcjsuen: I don’t like eggs because they come from chickens
rcjsuen: well okay it’s not like it’s the egg’s fault…?
rcjsuen: and it’s not like you can suddenly make eggs come from somewhere else
rcjsuen: Eclipse’s origin is IBM, and that isn’t going to change
rcjsuen: if you can’t stand it…i don’t know what to tell you
opafan48: a fork would be nice though :)
opafan48: with less commercial backing
rcjsuen: well, it’s open source, no one’s stopping anyone :o
rcjsuen: so it sounds like your problem is actually the fact that IBM has ppl on it
opafan48: i dont even kno the ppl.. so no problem with that
rcjsuen: Anyway, if you want to fork it, go right ahead.
opafan48: unfortunatelly i dont have either the talent nor the time..
rcjsuen: So what exactly would happen if it had less commercial backing anyway?
rcjsuen: I mean if it bothers you that much, feel free to use another tool. :)
opafan48: well i tried intellij idea, which is more sympathic in this issue.. but their license model doesnt fit my needs..
rcjsuen: I thought parts of IDEA was under ALv2
rcjsuen: And ALv2 is even more lax than the EPL.
opafan48: well thats not enough.. without the graph api
rcjsuen: opafan48: It sounds to me like you just want free stuff?
opafan48: rcjsuen, sure i do..

Well, at least this person’s honest…

NoobFukaire1: a fork OF ECLIPSE?
NoobFukaire1: do you realize the magnitude of that
rcjsuen: opafan48: well i dunno what you want us to say here exactly
rcjsuen: you want a fork, okay, but you don’t have the time, okay…

Twenty or so minutes later…

opafan48: anyway i check vi
* opafan48 has left #eclipse

So if you were on IRC at the time, what would you have said to opafan48?

It’s been exactly one month since I bickered about the EGit plug-in and I must say that it’s really come a long way. I would like to thank the developers for their hard work, their employers for letting them work on open source *cough, cough*, and for reviewing and committing my patches as I push them to Gerrit for review.

Regarding my last blog post on this matter, the synchronization feature that I hacked up has now been handed off over to Dariusz Luksza, the (un?)lucky student who will be working on JGit/EGit thanks to the Google Summer of Code programme. Naturally, this is good news for me because it means I can spend more time on Demon’s Souls (holy mackerel, this game is hard, I’m pretty sure I died ten times in three hours) and StarCraft II. But, of course, programming is my true calling (or is it IRC?) so I’ve actually been cooking up a side dish during the evenings and the weekends.

Obviously, I’ve already pushed the change to Gerrit for review by the EGit developers. If anyone’s feeling adventurous and decides to fetch the change and test it, please feel free to leave a comment on bug 313263. As I said before, I don’t know anything about Git, so what makes sense to me probably doesn’t make any sense to you. ;)

You’d think that for someone like me that started life as a random contributor that I’d be pretty thrilled about this whole distributed Eclipse.org Git shebang thingamajig. But, to be quite honest, I’m pretty…indifferent about the whole ordeal. I’m guessing it’s because I don’t really “get” Git yet.

At any rate, I’ve been tinkering with EGit these past few weeks and I have to say that it’s got quite a few rough edges and leaves a lot to be desired for when you compare it with the CVS integration. For example, it has dialogs with buttons that are “aligned” in strange ways…

…and the dialogs don’t seem honour the workbench’s font settings…

…and the commit dialog has no regard for what I’ve selected…

…like, seriously. They’re killing me here.

Well, at least they’re not killing me in my day job. EGit doesn’t seem to use any strange workbench internals so kudos to them for staying API clean.

So as you can see here, the SCM decorators show up, the commit dialog is happy (or perhaps mildly unhappy about its uneven fonts), but hey, who cares about that if the ‘Synchronize’ view is functional, right?

Wait, what? No! The ‘Synchronize’ view? EGit doesn’t have that. Oh no, it doesn’t (yet), but that’s where you come in, my dear readers, by providing your feedback and input on this feature. I (pretty much) don’t know a thing about Git and I don’t fully understand the Team APIs, but I’m sure that we can get this code in a usable state if we all work together. This feature will undoubtedly help put us one step closer to being able to provide first-class Git tooling for the Eclipse community.

Wayne, did I give enough input yet? Can I go play Dragon Age now? :(

agliodbs: does anyone know where the conference is?
rgrunber: agliodbs: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/ if you go there it should say in the top right corner.. Mar 22-25th Santa Clara, California
briandealwis: agliodbs: It’s at the Santa Clara Hyatt (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4887218/CA/Santa-Clara/eclipse-con-2010/Hyatt-Regency-Santa-Clara/)
agliodbs: briandealwis: thanks
agliodbs: rgrunber: Santa Clara’s a big town
rgrunber: agliodbs: yeh, point taken :P it did mention the hotel on their site.. maybe it was a bit unclear as to whether the conference was there.
agliodbs: it was entirely unclear
agliodbs: I’ve spoken with 4 other confused attendees
agliodbs: one of whom drove all the way to the SC Convention Center
agliodbs: this year will get zero walk-in traffic
agliodbs: since nobody knows there the conference is
rcjsuen: agliodbs: I suggest raising a bug immediately then.
agliodbs: e-mail sent to foundation staff
agliodbs: not that anyone is going to look at it before the conference is over
agliodbs: but maybe they’ll do better next year

I never figured out who agliodbs emailed but there you have it folks.

Update:
agliodbs has told me an email was sent to EMO.

It’s quiet…maybe too quiet.

Have you not been getting any Bugzilla emails since the 5th? If yes, see bug 302020. Due to the irony of wanting to be updated of the bug’s status but not being able to be updated of the bug’s status (that is, I can’t be updated about the bug because I can’t receive email updates about the bug), I guess I’ll just have to resort to refreshing the bug manually between random intervals.

If you’ve noticed that Bugzilla now asks you to put in a comment when you’re just marking a bug as a duplicate, you should go read up on bug 288058. Please don’t file new bugs or else the webmasters will have to mark it as a duplicate…and at the same time be forced to compose a pointless comment while marking it as such. ;)

Just last month, I joined the ranks of Nick Boldt, Ian Bull, Veronika Irvine, Wassim Melhem, Eric Moffatt, Andrew Niefer, Paul Webster, and presumably many other Eclipse community members that I don’t know of, in receiving my diploma from the University of Waterloo. I officially stopped being a student and subsequently began referring to myself as being “unemployed” instead of being a “student”. While I like being unemployed, bills don’t pay themselves.

Next Monday, I will transition from the “unemployed” state to the “employed” state, entering a world that young and naive people like yours truly refer to as the “real world”. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel any pressure. For the past three or four years or so, I could do whatever I wanted and do it whenever I felt like. If I felt like playing some video games instead of hacking on code, well, I could do just that. Of course, now that somebody’s paying me for my time I don’t really have that luxury anymore. :P

This transition translates to a couple of things:

1. participation in the newsgroup/forums, it’s kind of an on and off thing for me, I tend to only post when I’m working
2. decreased activity on #eclipse, as many of you may know, supporting users in real-time requires a lot of mental physique, I may or may not continue hanging around, here’s to hoping that the channel can sustain itself though
3. more blogging, at least that’s the plan
4. naturally, the “employed” blogging corollary follows, with “the writings on this blog are my own and may not reflect my employer’s stance on the issue in question” notice

I suppose the million dollar question is who will I be working for? The answer to that question would be IBM. I don’t think this is too much of a surprise but I’ll let my readers decide in the comments. I’ve given Ian a bit of dirt in the past for the Foundation being too corporate-ish…I guess now it’s his turn to give me some. What goes around comes around, eh?

What will I be working on? I know I’ve told some people that I’ll be working on Platform/UI but it seems that fate has something I like to call the element of surprise as I was informed about a month ago that I’d be sent to the Jazz team instead (okay, you got me Wassim). Of course, I’ll still have my commit rights but my activity on Bugzilla and CVS will be taking a hit.

Thanks goes out to everyone that has helped me along the way these past few years, you all know who you are. I would however like to single out Paul for all his help on IRC, both for splitting up the user support work and for my own Eclipse-related problems, and Chris for providing me with the user-to-contributor bridge when he mentored me back in 2006 for the Google Summer of Code program. Kudos also goes to everyone on IRC. I’ve had a lot of laughs and learned a lot from all of you both with Eclipse-related material and the many other random things we felt like talking about during any given day. ;)

Before I go, I would like to express my apologies to the Eclipse community at large for making the Platform team less diverse than it used to be as an “Individual” committer has now been replaced with an “IBM” one. :O

Eclipse-based applications looks and feels native thanks to SWT but once you start gandering at them icons, it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. For the readers out there that are familiar with the Tango Desktop Project, the window below doesn’t look out of place at all, right?

In the Eclipse world, the icons don’t really bother us at all since we’ve been looking at them for so many years. Unsurprisingly, for some clients and users, this doesn’t quite cut it and they want to customize them a little or they want the icons to match their own desktop’s. What if you could appease these people by adding a little ‘Theme’ menu at the top to flip around some options? Or what if the user could just define their own icon preferences…?

If you’ve ever been troubled by icons like the two bug reporters above, e4 CSS support could be the solution to your problems. Feel free to comment on bug 281593 if this piques your interest. You can help shape e4 into the next generation platform that you and your clients need! Join the e4 team, today! :)

Note: I realize that in the Eclipse world we have very specific user interface and icon design guidelines so this may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But hey, if you’re not interested in this, feel free to work on something else! Let me tell you, there’s no shortage of work in the e4 project. ;)