Wayne Beaton's blog

While many projects have claimed success with Git, a great many projects and developers continue to struggle with its adoption. In the fall of 2012, several projects chose to terminate rather than migrate their CVS repositories to Git. We have infrequent reports of commits being erased and general confusion regarding...

Earlier today, we started a pretty bold move from one data centre to a brand-spanking new one across the city. I say bold, because we had to take ourselves completely offline while we disconnected more than thirty bits of hardware, shipped it across the city, and then reassembled it all...

I’ll admit that a really big part of me wanted to see who would notice. Last week, I relatively quietly changed how we represent project metadata by switching parts of the Eclipse projects website and the corresponding elements in the developer portal over to the new Project Management Infrastructure (PMI)...

Most of the open source projects that I’m familiar with don’t tend to take significant contributions unless they come with development resources. Taking on significant new functionality can be pretty daunting for development teams that are already stretched. But how do you on-board new developer (committers) while observing the open...

I received this message via the EMO inbox today: haha noobs your number sorting in project explorer is like a mistake from windows 95 this is ridiculously funny He’s right. It is ridiculously funny. I’m assuming that the sender is part of some nerd mafia and sent this message to...

My previous entry spoke of an open source project’s responsibility to keep their community informed. In that entry, I focused on a big part of a project’s outbound communcation: the project website. Communication, though, extends beyond outward communication. A successful project needs to be connected to the community and that...

I receive a lot of email from the community. Much of it is from frustrated users who are trying to make something work. Here’s a recent example: The problem was that I didn’t realise that the [project] comes ON TOP of Eclipse…I thought that the [project] was something separate and...

If you follow me on Twitter ( @waynebeaton), then you may have noticed that I’ve been doing a reasonably good impression of the Grim Reaper. A lot of Eclipse projects have been terminated over the last couple of weeks. There’s more to come. Termination of projects is a pretty natural...

Eclipse Committers at EclipseCon Europe: if you see me wandering around, or sitting in a talk or at table, please come and introduce yourself. I’d like to meet you. Earlier tonight, I tweeted an observation: The EGit project doesn’t use its name in UI contributions. This helps the project feel...

Hey Eclipse Project Leads! The retirement date for CVS is approaching fast! If you have not already done so, you need to initiate plans to migrate your project repositories (both source code and website) to Git. All projects currently using CVS must migrate to Git before the deadline. All CVS...