The Eclipse Cloud DevTools contributor award for this month goes to STMicroelectronics for initiating the Theia Community Release. The community release is a new, special type of release done every three months in addition to the monthly releases.
Selecting the right release cycle is crucial for software projects, including open source projects. The general trend is towards short release cycles, allowing fast deployment of innovations and fixes. Eclipse Theia takes this approach with a monthly release schedule by default. However, Theia is very often used as a platform for custom products. For many of these adopters, a monthly update of the base technology is often not the best fit. Furthermore, several other technologies provide integrations with Theia and are looking for a good point in time to ensure compatibility.
Source: Pixabay
To solve the balancing act between different release cycles, STMicroelectronics initiated the community release for the Eclipse Theia project. Community releases are published every three months and are derived from the monthly releases. Community releases have a longer consolidation period, allowing integrators to ensure compatibility with the new version.
Theia has recently completed its second community release (2023-02), and the process was well received by adopters and contributors. Initiating the idea of a community release is a nice example for the openness of the Eclipse Theia ecosystem. Not only can contributors influence the technical direction of a project, the community can also influence and improve the underlying development processes and the project’s governance.
Thanks to STMicroelectronics for this great initiative!
The Cloud DevTools Working Group provides a vendor-neutral ecosystem of open-source projects focused on defining, implementing and promoting best-in-class web and cloud-based development tools. It is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, current members of the group include AMD, Arm, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Obeo, RedHat, Renesas, STMicroelectronics and TypeFox.
This Eclipse Cloud DevTools contributor award is sponsored by EclipseSource, providing consulting and implementation services for web-based tools, Eclipse GLSP, Eclipse Theia, and VS Code.
