Eclipse Website Blues

Related link: www.eclipse.org

Last week my Most Vexing Website (MVW) was almost
every bloody tourist
site in Belgium: no Flash presentation was too large and gorgeous, no download time too slow. This week, MVW award goes to the Eclipse website.

My task was simple: I wanted to find out how to contribute code to the Launcher project. This is the C++ program that invokes Java, and I want to contribute start-time JVM memory calculation.

• Finding out which group the launcher belonged to was tedious: as far as I can tell, it is part of SWT. I only found out where it belonged by looking at the URLs of the CVS tree. Then there are no links that I could discover to any actual humans.
• I decided a good strategy would be to look in the mail list archives for SWT. That requires you to join the platform-swt-dev list, and acknowledge an email. Fair enough, but still access to the archives was blocked. A bug or something.
• The methods of looking for someone to ask, then looking
  for someone to ask who I should ask both having failed, my next strategy was to look for a Request For Enhancement
  mechanism in the Bug-tracking database: phew, finally I found something where I was hoping it might be...err, but then
  the list of products didn't include SWT. OK, it must be
  under "Core" I thought.
• So I click on "Core" and wait. Nothing. So I click again.
  Now it wants a user name and password. The platform-swt-dev one doesnt work.
  So I have to register again.
  


• So now I have looked through over 50 pages,
  and registered twice,
  all in order to figure out who to talk to about
  submitting an enhancement. But it certainly
  makes me admire Eclipse for shielding their
  people from outside distractions or feedback,
  rather like the ghost prisoners at Gitmo etc.:
  I hadn't quite realized opacity was such an important
  part of Open Source.
  


• Anyway, I register and jump to the bug page.
  Do I see any way to request enhancements
  (or even report bugs)? No: it is a search screen
  for existing bugs. Having used Bugzilla before,
  I know to use the New button, then
  select the product. But facing the bug page,
  and reading the guidelines for reporting bugs,
  there is nothing to suggest that this a plausible
  place for requests for enhancements, except
  by default.
  


• So I give up in futility. Actually, I will
  mail something to the mail list first. I have
  always relied on the comfort of strangers.
  The regularity of the Eclipse site makes me
  expect that this is not in any way particular
  to the SWT team or group (or however it is
  organized, I still have absolutely no idea.)
  

The argument sometimes given against allowing
user-based enhancement/fixes is that there needs to
be adequate testing performed. But that is a matter
of infrastructure: when someone contributes an enhancement
the will have to submit tests to prove the enhancement.
In the age of test-driven development, this should
not be really so much extra work for the contributor.
The adequacy and results of the tests should increase
the efficiency of the integrator too: they have
less to do, therefore they can do more.

Maybe this is a cultural thing too: Open Source largely sells itself on the expectation that the user community will be finding bugs and figuring out workarounds, fixes and enhancements. The debate on the security virtues of Open Source trumpet this loudly. Having access to the source code not only allows programmers to make sense of the documentation, but also pinpoint the issues for maintainers. So the cultural issue is this: to what extent do Open Source teams see their jobs as primary coders and to what extent do they see themselves as gateways/facilitators/redactors of external contributions?

A development effort that saw itself in this
second light would be as much focused on
how to accept and process enhancements as
how to accept bug reports, and the website
would help this. Indeed, perhaps there
is scope for only accepting fixes and
enhancements and never accepting bug report without
them! We break it, you fix it!
Perhaps bug tracking is a distraction from
the more central task of harnessing the energy
of workers paid by someone else?

Has anyone managed to break though Eclipse's anti-enhancement battlements?