Voting is now open for the Eclipse Board of Directors. I was thrilled when I got the mail that I’ve been nominated. I’ve been involved with Eclipse for a long time and as I stated in my position paper it’s an amazing community. You can browse the list of candidates and read more about each candidate on the Eclipse.org website.

If you are a committer you are able to vote! If you haven’t received a mail with your voting password yet please have a look at this mail which was sent to the committer mailing list. It explains how to register as a full member with a few steps. Basically you need to sign the membership agreement and fax it to the Foundation’s office. There is still time! Voting ends on March 11, 2011 at 3pm Eastern time.

I think the most interesting challenges for the upcoming term are Git and Gerrit. There is still a significant amount of code in CVS and quite a few projects are planning to switch after the Indigo release. Now Gerrit is interesting. There’s a really good description and a screencast written/created by Alex available. Very good read and watch. It really has some benefits and potential for an important role in managing source contributions to Eclipse projects. I think it’s clear that with Git the current way of handling patches through Eclipse Bugzilla doesn’t scale. So we have to find a good story for integrating Gerrit into the Eclipse IP process. But frankly, I don’t see IPzilla go away anytime soon. There is still the whole management of 3rd party dependencies which is well implemented there. Of course, there is always room for improvement (even outside of IPzilla).

On the other hand, Gerrit is a new tool that needs to be dealt with by the Eclipse webmasters. Once it is an essential part of the Eclipse development infrastructure it needs to be governed with SLAs (which basically translates to manpower). Thus, this effort must be supported by the Board which I hope to drive forward when I’m elected as one of your representatives.