I am encouraged by the number of Eclipse project plans that have been updated over the last few weeks. I’m very positive that we will have most of them set in time for the approaching a September 30 deadline. I have spoken with about a dozen project leads directly to help them assemble their plans. It seems that every day, two or three projects get added to the “complete” column. Project leaders, it seems, understand the value of setting themes, direction, and schedule in a public plan: its a great way to help your community develop and participate in the project.
A lot of projects are opting to just adopt their parent project’s plan. One obvious example is the Eclipse Project: most of the projects that fall under the Eclipse-top level are sharing the plan assembled by the Eclipse PMC. This is all about letting the community know what the project is doing, and sharing a plan is a fine way to do that: so long as the shared plan actually makes sense.
The Web Tools Project is taking a slightly different approach: each of the projects has its own plan, but defers to the parent project for release milestones. This, unfortunately, makes it a little more challenging to use automation to determine if the plan is valid, but it seems like a reasonable way to do things, so we’ll adapt. I’m considering adding a notion of inheritance to the project plan XML Schema to address this.
For the overwhelming number of projects that have their plans in order: thank you. For others, let me know how I can help.
Project leads and committers: if you want to meet with me at Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 to talk about project plans, the Eclipse Development Process, or anything else, please let me know.
