The German news site heise online reported today that Eclipse will be split up into several key-areas. It’s an interesting new path the Eclipse Foundation is striking. Here is the link to the corresponding eWeek article.
Vorstellbar sei eine Trennung in die Bereiche Lebenszyklus-Management, Modellierung, Embedded Systems, Datenverwaltung, Systems Management und SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).
In my opinion this means that the current organization of several top-level projects will change to better reflect the targeted key-areas. We have a lot top-level projects and some of them do span multiple areas. This makes it hard for new parties to find all projects for a specific area.
One interesting question for me is what would happen to the top-level projects. Will they be kept as a rather technical collection of projects? Will the new structure replace or expand them? In case of replacing, do we need to consider some kind of backward compatibility for the current structure?
IMHO branching is good as long as it is done carefully and forsighted. In the case of Eclipse I expect the community to participate actively in the process … at least I will. π
UPDATE
See Mike Milinkovich’s comment about this. It looks like the word “branch” was misunderstood by the German news site heise online.
UPDATE 2
heise online has now published an updated version of its article.
This is a misunderstanding of the word “branch”. Eclipse is *not* being split up. “Branch” in the context of the the eWeek article is referring to growing new projects into new areas. This is all normal growth, and is consistent with the Roadmap document we published back in March.
There is no new structure being contemplated at the Foundation.
And FWIW, I am pretty sure I didn’t use the word “branch” in my talk at EclipseWorld.
Mike, thanks for clarifying on this. This really turns it upside down π