Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tooling) 8.6.0 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.

Release

8.6.0

Description

CDT 8.6.0 is a minor release that ships with the Luna Service Release 2.  It fixes bugs and brings new features which are listed in the corresponding CDT New&Noteworthy page.

API Certification

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

Architectural Issues

The CDT currently depends on RSE to support remote debugging.  This will continue to be true for this release but we plan on moving to org.eclipse.remote for the next release.

Security Issues

There are no security issues.

 

 

Non-Code Aspects

As of this release, we are reducing the number of GDB versions we officially support.  We now only provide support for GDBs that are more recent or equal to versions 7.1 which is already 5 years old.  The CDT should continue to work with older versions, but committers will not verify this anymore.

CDT now provides an example plugin that shows how to extend its debugger.

Usability Details

The CDT continues to follow Eclipse User Interface Guidelines however efforts to improve usability of Launch Configurations continue.  For this release, there are no major changes included, but in the next release we expect to release the new Launch Bar.

We have a continuing issue in making users aware of new features.  Different suggestions have been proposed but nothing has been done yet.

End of Life

The ancient CDI debug interface is sometimes causing confusion to new comers who don't realize that code is end-of-life. Nothing will be done for this relase as it is a maintenance release. Consideration will be made to improve the situation for the Mars release.  The question of doing a major release has been brought to the communities attention and would open the door to doing a major cleanup of such code.

Standards

No changes for this release.

Communities

The CDT is going full-speed in its use of Gerrit and contributions are coming in steadily.  We try to make the contribution process as easy and smooth as possible. The number of committers remains stable but we would like to see it grow further.