Tonight, I did what I do every night: try to take over the world. The Eclipse Dashboard project has been stagnant for a while with no project lead or active committers, so–per the Eclipse Development Process (EDP), Section 4.6–I decided that the existing project leadership was dysfunctional and replaced it. Where it might get a little weird is that new project lead is me.
A little background on the project might be in order. Dash–Dashboard’s parent project–is a bit special: it’s concerned with providing tools for committers. In general, the Dash project does not fit the typical “APIs and frameworks” model that we expect from Eclipse projects, but rather it provide very specific tools for very specific purposes. Dashboard exemplifies this notion; its raison d’etre is to extract data out of the Eclipse Foundation source code repositories and provide it in a consumable form. This data is used to show project activity on the project summary pages, determine which committers are active, and more (you can access the data on http://dash.eclipse.org). I recently built some scripts to include Git repositories in the Dashboard story. Now that I’m the project lead and soon-to-be-committer, I can make sure that those scripts get properly committed and provide ongoing support (the existing scripts are pretty fragile and could use a facelift). Dashboard isn’t the sort of project that will be very active. Activity will come in short sprints as we make improvements, and respond to infrastructure changes.
The fact of the matter is that this is the sort of project that nobody in the community really wants to lead, so I’m a natural fit. Besides, taking over this project fits nicely with my plans to take over the world.
