I am having great difficulty expressing myself in words but I can say without question that it has been a great privilege of mine to have been able to work with so many of you the past six years. It has been extremely fulfilling for me to work in open source given the closeness that is emitted in the interactions on Bugzilla, the mailing lists, IRC, and pick-your-favourite-social-media. Whenever I reported or fixed a bug, I really felt that I was making a difference.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with all my free time after I’ve moved on. I think I’ll still be around though. I will not be submitting fixes as often as I used to but you’ll still find me in Bugzilla. Even if I stopped CC’ing myself on bugs today there are still thousands of bugs that I am currently CC’d on. ;) So, I will not actually say “Good bye”.

I will still be going to EclipseCon North America…perhaps to my future team’s chagrin, but not to mine. So if anyone wants to chat, you can find me there. Don’t try to buy me any alcohol though since I don’t drink. ;)

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask on our e4-dev mailing list!

As someone that’s been both a student and a mentor for Google’s Summer of Code program, it was great to see Dariusz win the 2011 Top Contributor award. I was originally sad to see that David Williams hadn’t made the top three in the Top Committer category but since he ended up receiving a Lifetime Contribution award, I guess I won’t get upset over all the people that didn’t vote for him in the Top Committer category.

My talk for the 4.x compatibility layer was pretty empty originally but it ended up being a full room in the end. Maybe the topic appealed to a lot of people or maybe there was a lot of people from the Boris Bokowski fan club, I don’t know. Admittedly, if there were a lot of people from the latter category I’m sad to say they were all disappointed since Boris was at a board meeting and couldn’t do the talk with me. I started the talk holding the mic but apparently it was so bad that someone in the audience actually came up on stage to both suggest and to physically clip the mic onto my jacket! Sorry, everyone! Two people approached me about where they could get the slides so I have uploaded them online for your convenience.

If anyone’s curious about the use of Eclipse 4 technologies in an RCP application, you might want to stop by the Stevens Creek room at 1140 today!

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.

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?

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. ;)

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? :(

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

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