Lending a hand with the Eclipse SDK

Shipping Eclipse each year is a lot of work. The SDK contains code from 3 Top level projects (Eclipse, RT and Tools (Orbit)). There are 4+ Products (Platform, JDT, PDE , Equinox + Releng) and close to 20 Components (SWT, Text, UI, UA, etc…).  Once the SDK is built, the release train starts bolting on other projects (Mylyn, EGit, CDT, Birt, WPT, etc..).  Getting all these bits in the right place at the right time isn’t easy (although Kim and David sure makes it look easy).

While some teams are actively working on their components, other components are very mature and simply need some TLC from time-to-time.  There is certainly a number of things we could do with p2, but for the most part it works very well.  Pascal has been donating much of his personal time to p2 in order to give it the TLC and polish it needs. Pascal is pretty smart and 10 minutes of his time equates to an hour for most people :-).  However, it’s not fair that he spends all his free time tracking down problems in order for p2 to makes its contribution to the SDK.

I’m happy to say that I’ll be helping Pascal co-lead the p2 project.  There’s a few things I have planned including

1. Fixing a few recent problems on Java 7 Runtimes
2. Improving the performance of the UI
3. Looking at how we can reduce the size of our metadata (content.jar)

I’ll also be presenting some p2 related work at EclipseCon.  If you have questions, I try to hang around IRC and I’m also on twitter (@irbull).