Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to NetBeans

I agree with Peter's main assertion that there has usually been little
advance notice to the community when a major component (e.g. Visual
Web, UML, Python, Ruby, etc.) is going to be spun off to the
community.  The decision to do that has always been made by Sun/Oracle
and then communicated to the community afterwards, then
development/maintenance stops immediately (if it had not already
stopped).

I think there would be *way* more success if that decision to hand
something off to the community was made and communicated a few
releases before it was actually implemented, to give the community a
chance to "cross train" with the development team while it's still
active.  I think that speaks to Ivan's comments about succession
training.  To me, it's similar to when you've accepted a new job --
you can expect the transition to be a lot smoother if you give advance
notice and train your replacement.

Oracle: Can the community expect more notice and a chance to
participate with the original developers before a feature is handed
off to the community?  If not, why not?

Although there isn't always as much current design documentation as
we'd like, I suspect it's just that it doesn't exist (or wasn't kept
updated).  As an open source project, I'd expect that whatever design
documentation was created is also available to the public and as far
as I know it has been.  As an example, here is what I find on Visual
Web:

   http://wiki.netbeans.org/VisualWeb

Ivan also touched on something important, which is that the "ide"
parts of NetBeans have not been as stable (as a development platform)
as the "platform" parts.  Here's an example to support this claim:

   http://www.enclojure.org/

     "The latest version does support NB 7.x but there have been some
     intermittent and annoying problems reported that made me back off
     and recommend using the previous version."

Hopefully they have filed bug reports detailing the issues so they can
get fixed, and hopefully they are getting fixed.  OTOH, I note that
Caoyuan Deng has Erlang and Scala support working in 7.0.

In the most recent NB Governance Board meetings, we have discussed
hosting build jobs for some important/active community projects on the
netbeans.org Hudson server.   Sven Reimers has been leading that
effort and is working with John Jullion-Ceccarelli (NetBeans
Engineering Manager) to get it implemented.  Ivan, I'd think that a
test suite which further validates the IDE parts would be an ideal
candidate for this.

Finally, I have heard many people tell me jVi is the main reason they
started using NetBeans.  I'd like to request that all truck drivers
stay at least 50 feet from Ernie Rael at all times!

-- 
Tom Wheeler
http://www.tomwheeler.com/