Stay out of the cold with the latest eclipse I-candy

After all the excitement of EclipseCon, I arrived home to realize that although Ottawa currently lacks Santa Clara's warm breezes and sunshine, spring is definitely on the way because ...
1) The melting snow decided to visit my basement
2) Eclipse 3.3 M6 is next week

M6 represents the API freeze for the Europa release of the top-level Eclipse project. In fact, at this juncture, teams must ask the PMC for approval to make API changes.

If you are adopting 3.3 components as part of the Europa release or for your commercial project, it's a good idea to take a look our integration builds, not just milestone builds. Consuming your dependancies each milestone means that you are in only in a position to understand changes after the milestone has shipped. Taking a look at the builds in the weeks leading up to a milestone allows you to provide feedback on new functionality through bugzilla or mailing lists, specify how it impacts your use case and offer to help out :-) while the code is still under development.

The latest integration build is available here.

Of course, as we gear down to the Europa release at the end of June, the number and scope of changes will start to wane. Why? Submitting major new functionality close to the shipping date puts the release at risk. We like to ship and then everyone takes vacation. It's a tradition around here.

To mitigate against the temptation to release risky code, the rules of engagment in an end game plan specify increasing levels of sign off and verification for changes as we march toward Europa release date. This ensures that there is a conversation among members of the team regarding whether a change should be implemented, the associated risks and the possible impact to downstream teams, instead of just one person with the fervent wish to close another bug.

The M6 build menu looks something like this...

Monday starts off with a series of builds toward a test candidate.

Tuesday is test day, where people test the Monday's test candidate.

Wednesday is another build day where teams submit fixes to the issues they discovered during the test pass.

Thursday we have a final build and then ask teams for sign off. Inevitably, there is a rebuild to address a late breaking issue.