For the past eight months we have been working towards a July 2010 release
tentatively called the e4 1.0 release. One of the major goals of this
release was to bring the e4 technology delivered in our July 2009 "0.9"
release up to a level of maturity and stability that we could run the
Eclipse platform and its ecosystem of plug-ins on top of it. As a
community we have been referring to this combination of the existing
Eclipse platform with e4 technology as "Eclipse 4.0".
Last week we began building the full Eclipse 4.0 SDK, and delivered it as
part of our M5 milestone. This build combines some e4 components, the e4
compatibility layer, and the Eclipse project 3.6 SDK. With this milestone
it is time to switch emphasis from incubating e4 work to focus on
graduating, polishing, and delivering this Eclipse 4.0 SDK. Since this
combined release incorporates plug-ins from several Eclipse sub-projects,
it would be incorrect to call it an e4 release. To reflect this reality,
and our primary emphasis on the Eclipse 4.0 SDK deliverable, the Eclipse
project PMC has decided to take the following steps:
- We will no longer refer to the "e4 1.0 release" in our plans and
downloads after M5. We will instead call our July 2010 release the
"Eclipse SDK 4.0" release. This deliverable will combine components from
the Eclipse Platform, JDT, PDE, Equinox, ECF, and EMF out of the Helios
release, with the e4 components required to build the Eclipse 4.0 SDK.
- CSS Styling, Modeled Workbench, and some of the core e4 programming
model infrastructure have matured in e4 and will move into the Eclipse
Platform project prior to the July release. This new technology allows
building the Eclipse 4.0 SDK on top of it, which thus only depends on
graduated components.
- e4 JavaScript tooling has been moved to the JSDT project under the
Webtools top-level project.
- Other components such as SWT Browser Edition, JavaScript modularity,
XWT, Toolkit Model, Bespin Server, and the new e4 resources work around
semantic file systems are going to remain in the e4 incubator for now.
These components have not reached the level of stability and community
required for graduation into a mature project. We will continue to
evaluate whether more components should graduate either in this release or
later releases, based on their progress and adoption.
- The e4 components that remain in the incubator will release
simultaneously with the Eclipse top-level project's 4.0 release, and will
be available in a separate release repository, much like the Helios
repository and EPP packages incorporate both incubating and mature
components in a single release. Since we intend to keep the e4 project as
a perpetual incubator, it doesn't make sense to attach a traditional
version number to the incubating e4 portion of the release. Where
necessary, we will refer to the e4 incubator portion as the "e4 July 2010"
downloads (for example on the e4 downloads page). Version numbers of
individual e4 plug-ins will evolve according to the Eclipse project's
standard version numbering guidelines.
- We will continue running e4 incubator builds throughout the July 2010
release cycle (and beyond). In addition we will run Eclipse project 4.0
stream builds. Until the Eclipse project Helios release is completed, we
will run these 4.0 stream builds out of the "R4_HEAD" branch of the
Eclipse project repository. Note that the vast majority of plug-ins don't
require branching, and will be consumed directly from the "R3.6" version
tag produced by the Helios release.
A draft plan of the Eclipse Project 4.0 release is now available [1]. This
plan is quite similar to our previous e4 plan, with the same milestones
and timeline, and most of the same plan items.
[1]
http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project-plan.php?planurl=http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/plans/eclipse_project_plan_4_0.xml
The Eclipse PMC
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