One of the key roles of he Eclipse Architecture Council is to maintain the Eclipse Development Process (EDP). Maintenance usually takes the form of an update every year or so. Updates to the EDP are approved by the Eclipse Board of Directors. The Architecture Council records issues that need to be addressed and tracks the work in the Community/Architecture component in the Eclipse Foundation’s Bugzilla instance.
The update to the EDP in late 2018 changed the way that we engage in release reviews. Project teams only need to engage in a release review for releases that occur more than one year after their last successful release review. For most project teams (i.e., active projects making regular releases), this means that they only need to engage in a release review once every year.
Project teams still need to create a release record, but do not have to engage with the Eclipse Management Organization (EMO) or their Project Management Committee (PMC), and don’t need to submit their IP Log for review. Project leads must still take care to ensure that the intellectual property included in all releases has been fully vetted by the IP due diligence process (in practical terms, this means that all CQs for content included in a release must be resolved, and the license compatibility of all third party content must be established before making the release official).
Eclipse open source project teams who aren’t sure whether or not they’re ready to release, can check with the EMO or can submit their IP Log for a sanity check.
