Provisioning work starts in earnest

For my inaugural blog entry it is fitting that the topic be, in my biased opinion, one of the most important areas emerging in Eclipse today -- Provisioning. As you may be aware, there have been various provisioning efforts starting at Eclipse over the past weeks and months. In particular

• Eclipse Packaging Project
• Equinox Incubator Provisioning workarea
• Maya Project proposal
• Various other related efforts in COSMOS and other projects

Just last week the Foundation ran the Ganymede Provisioning Workshop aimed at bringing together some of the communities working in the area. As you can see, the workshop was quite a success.


In addition to the (very important) social aspects of the workshop, we accomplished a number of technical direction goals. I'll highlight a few here. You can read all the details on the workshop home page and the breakout results page.

• Terminology - A common set of terms is vitally important to easing communication and interaction as we move forward. What the heck is a "profile" anyway?
  
• Provisioning project intersections - Within the various Eclipse projects and ecosystem participants there is alot of provisioning work going on. We spent a fair bit of time understanding what was happening using lightning retrospectives and then characterizing the efforts and identifying levels of interest in participating new provisioning work at Eclipse.
  
• Generalized architectural understanding - As part of investigating the intersection between the different efforts and coming up with some terminology, we arrived at a "big animals" picture that seemed to gain general acceptance.
  
• Action opportunities - A number of people signed up to do various tasks to continue the interaction the workshop started. Take a look at the list and see if there is something you want to contribute. A new opportunity even!
  

As a means of further communication and collaboration we agreed to create a mailing list provisioning-dev@eclipse.org where the various projects will discuss issues of general interest. We also agreed to use the wiki and tag provisioning related pages with the "Provisioning" category. The content here has already started to fill-out as the action items from the workshop are being completed.

We have gotten off to a great start. There is tons to do but there appear to be a number of motivated people in the community. For those of you who did not make it to the workshop or did not know about these various provisioning efforts, it's not too late! The terms, designs, code, directions etc are not carved in stone. We have initial starting points. Here is your opportunity to get involved and help drive a fundamental part of Eclipse. Post a message on the mailing list with your interests, ideas, and intention to contribute. See you there...