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by mmilinkov 3925 days ago
"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"

JDT is not dying.

I am the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, and I am here to tell you that the commit numbers quoted in the blog post are completely bogus.

The stats shown on the Eclipse project pages only show the activity in the master branch. At the moment, the vast majority of the JDT activity is happening in a separate Java 9 branch. If you actually look at the git repositories directly (see link below for one repo), you can find a couple hundred commits in September, not zero.

The other thing going on is that the team has been in rampdown mode for the Mars.1 release shipping in the first week of October. A code freeze leading to a release is standard operating procedure for the Eclipse project.

In summary, this article is based on incorrect and incomplete numbers, and is entirely misleading.

http://git.eclipse.org/c/jdt/eclipse.jdt.core.git/stats/?per...

4 comments

Sorry, I got the root cause wrong. The problem is not that the numbers didn't include the branches, it is because it doesn't include the sub-projects (where the real work is happening).

The JDT root project is basically only going to show commits to build scripts and the like.

For those who are interested, you can read the Eclipse 4.6 release plan, and see the stuff planned for next June's release. But at the risk of repeating myself: a lot of the energy is going into the Java 9 work.

https://www.eclipse.org/projects/project-plan.php?planurl=ht...

Hey, just wanted to say Thank you! Keep up the great work. I've been using Eclipse for about 8 years.

My only major gripe: Why aren't the Eclipse binaries signed with GPG keys? The binaries are served off mirrors. We just saw XCodeGhost happen. This really needs to be fixed.

Minor gripes: ARM builds would be nice. Hi DPI would be nice.

Zoyo, Thanks for the kind words.

Regarding the GPG signing, currently we sign every executable and jar inside the zip file, and rely on SHA checksums to allow users to verify the content. If you think that's insufficient, could I ask that you open a bug explaining your reasoning?

There are ARM builds available at fedora.org. But I agree that getting those available somewhere on eclipse.org would be sweet.

I think high DPI is on the list of things to do. Contributions are always gratefully accepted :)

Thanks for using Eclipse!

> "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"

Indeed it can and does, but welcome to HN where people care about setting the record straight. Thanks for coming and giving us the facts, and welcome to the community too!

Thanks for the warm welcome. It's much appreciated.
Are there any stats regarding the work that goes into the "IDE/editing" components vs. the amount of work on Eclipse as a modular, pluggable AbstractFactoryFactory platform for random companies to add their proprietary stuff on top?

As a long term user it feels like no one from the Eclipse project actually uses Eclipse to write code anymore.