Remy Suen’s “How to Fix a Bug in Eclipse” article is now available on eclipse.org/resources. In this article, Remy discusses various tips and techniques for getting involved with an Eclipse project and providing a patch.
I discussed this article a few posts back. In that post, I discussed some technology that I’ve been tinkering with to help sort out how to find the project that contains a particular class in Eclipse CVS or SVN. This information would make it very easy for a would-be contributor to obtain the project, and build a patch. That tinkering has progressed a little, and I am now able to generate an XML file describing the mapping. The challenge right now is that it takes a very long time to run. I’m going to experiment a little with adding some threads, since I’m pretty sure that it’s spending most of its time waiting for information to come back. It probably doesn’t help that I’m using the internal CVSFileStore which was never really intended for this sort of use.
Soon, I hope to make an XML file available so that you can tell me how useful this really is. Other good options for dealing with the problem have been discussed (e.g. Alex Blewitt, OSGi Bug 48, and Bug 243582). This solution has the benefit of not requiring any work by project committers, but suffers from the fact that it is limited only to bundles hosted at eclipse.org (though, there’s no reason why it can’t be pointed at other repositories).
I’ve just learned that my poster session for Eclipse Summit Europe has been approved. I’m looking forward to showing off this technology and getting your feedback. See you there!
