Eclipse Equinox 4.4.0 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.

Project
Eclipse Equinox
Release

4.4.0

Description

The Equinox 4.4 release continues to focus on implementing the latest Core OSGi specification and selected OSGi Compendium services.  The final draft of the OSGi Core specification (Release 6) became availabe in March 2014.  The Equinox 4.4 release includes a full implementation of the R6 Core Framework as well as several compendium service implementations.  Many of the Equinox specification implementations from this release are used as the Reference Implementations for the OSGi R6 specification.  

This release also includes a major refactoring and reimplementation of the Core Framework based on the generic OSGi dependency model.  Given the amount of significant changes this release the version of this release is being bumped up to 4.4.

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 6
  • The Equinox OSGi Framework no longer supports Eclipse 2.0 style plug-ins by default
  • The Equinox OSGI Framework no longer includes an implementation for the old Equinox resolver API (org.eclipse.osgi.service.resolver)
  • All Equinox Framework specific hook implementations are broken and will need to migrate
Non-Code Aspects
  • A new OSGi Core Framework specification R6 has been released
    • This release of Equinox includes a major refactoring of the core framework implementation
  • A compendium OSGi specification R6 has was not released in time for the Luna release
    • Several of the OSGi services implemented in Equinox will be updated to implement the R6 compendium specification in a future release.
  • The Luna 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.
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 4.4 migration guide
  • No API deprecations to note for this release, but the following implementations are not provided by defauilt
    • Equinox state/resolver API
    • Plugin converter service
  • Many of the internal hooks in Equinox have changed which require all Equinox framework hook implementations to migrate in order to work in the 4.4 release.
Standards
  • OSGi
    • Equinox Core Framework Specification, Release 6
    • Service Compendium Specification, Release 5
  • 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, 2013 and May 2013 (RC2)
    • More than 500 reports were created
    • Over 400 were resolved
    • 24 were backported to Juno
    • 119 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

 

Subprojects included with this release
Equinox Bundles
Equinox Framework
Equinox p2
Equinox Security
This release is part of Luna