I’ve been following the Java™ 8 work by the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) team for a while now. Naturally, they’re tracking all of the work through our Bugzilla instance.
All Java 8 bugs are prefixed with “[1.8]”, which makes them pretty easy to find. My Mylyn query shows me that with 589 bugs closed, the team has around 75% of the bugs fixed. Of course, new bugs are still coming in, but that is an impressive metric none-the-less.
Java 8 Bug Summary
If we think of Bug 380106 as the first Java 8 bug, then it follows that development on Java 8 began on May 21/2012.
Since that date, JDT Git repositories have recorded 2,806 commits authored by seventy-eight (78) different contributors (authors, not necessarily committers). That number of contributors is staggering. And these contributors come from a pretty diverse set of organizations. Many are independent.
Officially, the JDT project and its subprojects (Core, Debug, UI) have a total of 24 committers. If we assume that all of these committers have been active in this period (which isn’t true), that’s an impressive 2/3 of all contributors who come from outside of the project. While this number doesn’t help us understand how prolific the contributors are (I’ll work out a query for that), I think that it does tell us that JDT and its subprojects are doing a very good job of operating in an open manner.
Of those 2,806 commits, 795 are easily attributed to Java 8 development (i.e. they have “[1.8]”) in their comment. By “eyeballing” some of the comments, that number is obviously very low. I’ll have see what I can do to refine that query to not depend solely on that particular string. Those 795 commits are attributed to twenty-two (22) contributors.
Probably the easiest way to keep pace with ongoing development is to listen in on the Bugzilla discussions.
- Log into Bugzilla
- Navigate to “Email Preferences”
- Scroll down to “User Watching”
- Add the following email addresses (or some subset) to the “watch list”:
- jdt-apt-inbox@eclipse.org
- jdt-core-inbox@eclipse.org
- jdt-debug-inbox@eclipse.org
- jdt-doc-inbox@eclipse.org
- jdt-text-inbox@eclipse.org
- jdt-ui-inbox@eclipse.org
By almost any standard that I can think of, the JDT project is very active, diverse, open, and transparent.
