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
Project: 
Eclipse Equinox

Release Review

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
  • 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
  • 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: 
Eclipse Project
Eclipse Equinox
Equinox Bundles
Equinox Framework
Equinox p2
Equinox Security
This release is part of Kepler.
Links: 
Approved IP Log

Comments Sign in to post comments

Glyn Normington's picture

Submitted by Glyn Normington on Tue, 2013-05-28 04:25

+1