Eclipse Equinox 3.9.0 Release Review

Type

Release

State

Successful

End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 - 12:00

Project

Eclipse Equinox

Release

3.9.0

Description

See the Equinox Kepler release plan document.

API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues

The Equinox Core OSGI Framework now requires Java 5
Many Equinox components now require Java 5
No longer use jsr14 compiler option to down compile Java 5 source to Java 4. This was the main reason many Equinox components moved up to Java 5
Parts of Equinox depend on Jetty 8 which required Java 6

Non-Code Aspects

No new OSGi specification is available for the Kepler release
- This release of Equinox is largely being treated as a maintenance release
- Several new features are included in p2 for shared install scenarios and remediation
The Kepler release will contain updated User and ISV documentation
Community is active
- Mailing lists and newsgroups have steady activity
  - equinox-dev@eclipse.org, eclipse-dev@eclipse.org, p2-dev@eclipse.org
Steady flow of bugzilla reports
Presentations and BOFs at EclipseCons
Internationalization
- Latin1 and Latin2 locales supported in all operating environments
- DBCS locales supported on all platforms
- GB18030-1 Chinese codepage standard is supported on Windows, Linux GTK and Mac
Localization
- Tested for localization
Accessibility
- Tested for accessibility, but Equinox has minimal UI.

Usability Details

Equinox has very little UI. The most noteable UI is in p2.
p2 UI has had several small enhancements to help improve the user experience.
- Remediation has been added to assist users when an install operation goes wrong and guides the users to a possible solution.

End of Life

When evolving API the Equinox Project will, whenever possible, deprecate the affected API methods and continue to keep them operational
Exceptions to this rule are in the 3.9 migration guide
No API deprecations to note for this release
Several planned deprecations coming for the next release (Luna)
- Equinox state/resolver API
- Plugin converter service
- Support for Eclipse 2.0 style plugins at runtime

Standards

OSGi
- Equinox Core Framework Specification, Release 5
- Service Compendium Specification, Release 4.3 and Release 4.2
Continued development of the next OSGi specification
Many Equinox components provide reference implementations to the OSGi Alliance

Communities

The Equinox project is developed using an open, transparent, and inclusive process
Teams rely on Bugzilla, mailing list and newsgroups for input
Between June, 2012 and May 2012 (RC2)
- More than 500 reports were created
- Over 330 were resolved
- 40 were backported to Juno
- 53 were resolved without a code change
  - invalid, duplicate, worksforme, etc
Equinox team members are active in Bugzilla, newsgroup, mailing lists and IRC
Using the equinox-dev IRC channel
- irc://irc.freenode.net/#equinox-dev
- also see: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/IRC
The Equinox team participates in code camps, conference presentations, and tutorials, including
EclipseCon, OSGi DevCon, JavaOne etc.
The Equinox team interacts with other open source projects, standards bodies, and other projects on eclipse.org, including
- OSGi Alliance, Apache Aries, Apache Felix