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.

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.

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

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. ;)