Thursday, June 3, 2010

Eclipse Labs: To Migrate or Not to Migrate?

I'm really happy about the recent creation of the new Eclipse Labs. While I would absolutely love to have my Diver project as an official Eclipse project in incubation, I'm afraid that the process is too heavy-weight. I work in research which often requires a very malleable programming schedule... I don't think that I would be able to hit the release targets of Eclipse. Plus the IP process can be a little long. My friend and colleague Ian Bull was able to make his Zest project an official Eclipse project (it is now part of GMF/draw2D) while he was doing his Ph.D... he did have a little programing help from some of the other members of our lab ;-). I'm a Masters student, though: the program is too short to wait for my project to be approved by the committers.

So, Eclipse Labs is exactly perfect for what I need. It has the benefit of the Eclipse brand, but it doesn't carry the baggage of official Eclipse projects. It's too bad that it wasn't available six months ago when I was making Diver a tool open to the public. The best option I had at the time was SourceForge, which has been quite good, really.

So, now I'm left with the question of whether or not to migrate Diver to the Eclipse Labs hosting. I would really like Diver to have a closer tie to the Eclipse brand. But, I would lose a lot of work that was put into creating the project content for Diver over at SourceForge. Most specifically, I would lose are the hard work that I put into creating the web site. Google code has its wiki, which is OK, but it isn't as rich as what I've been able to make with my web page.

So: to migrate, or not to migrate? I don't know. Is there any real benefit?

3 comments:

  1. You know, you could just move to Eclipse.org as a Technology project... we love everyone :)

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  2. I hope over time we will start promoting Eclipse Labs project at eclipse.org. It is going to take some time but that is the intention. Ideally that will be the benefit of being on Eclipse Labs. I also hope it will become a destination for people looking for Eclipse oriented open source technology.

    I hope that helps.

    Ian

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  3. Thanks, guys, for your comments. I think that I might stay with sourceforge for the next little while anyway. I have a lot of work that I have to do, and I have to prioritize it. I think the Labs is a great thing, though.

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