Tag Archives: Eclipse

Categorize our Orbit

As part of our “Give Orbit some love for Helios” initiative I started adding categories to Orbit repositories. Whenever you include an Orbit p2 repository in your target platform, you’ll now be able to cherry pick only the bundles you really need from a convenient set of categories. No need to download any unnecessary overhead.

Try it out yourself. Here is a link to an Orbit p2 repository with categories:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/orbit/committers/drops/I20100428041519/updateSite/

I also captured a  screenshot for your convenience:

Frankly, I’m not a creative guy but I had to come up with some categories. Your feedback on the categories is really appreciated.

Understanding Open Source

I came across this couple of times before and I always wanted to blog about it. In my daily work life I see many developers which just don’t get Open Source. For example, some discover issues in libraries they use. But they don’t fix them. They don’t even inform the maintainers of a library. Yet others have a great new use-case to address. Again, the library doesn’t support it. Thus, they write a great deal of new code to address their issue and eventually run into new ones (for example, see this thread).

But it’s that darn simple!

  1. Checkout the library from source. You can use a well known tag/branch for this.
  2. Get in touch with the maintainers and implement your modifications.
  3. Build and release your modified version until a new official release is available.