Thursday, March 15, 2007

GEF Updates and the Eclipse Project Info Process

Over the last few months, I have been getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of info I get about an Eclipse project that is really important to my work [GEF]. There is nothing in the project plan and nothing much targeted at 3.3. Even most things targeted at 3.2.2 weren't resolved or even updated as of the release. After getting little on the project newsgroup, I decided to post in the foundation newsgroup. I was a little apprehensive because I wasn't completely sure if this was appropriate, but soon after, I got a great response from David Williams:


I'll let GEF folks talk about GEF, but I'll speak to process. First, you did the right thing, just keep asking until you get an answer. First start with newsgroups, then a polite question on dev lists (if not response on newsgroups). And, if no response from dev list, then a not to a PMC member (or, the pmc mailing list) would probably be in order. I believe GEF is in the Tools project. Then, if no resposne from the PMC, the Eclipse foundation (this mailing list) is a good place. If no response there, you can bet the project will be "retired" as an inactive project soon -- which is _NOT_ the case for GEF. I know it is activly maintained, thought not sure they have lots of feature enhancements planned.
This stuff may seem like common sense to long time Eclipse developers, but at least for me, its nice to see it written down so others can follow it.

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Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Couple of Vista Utils

I found a couple of things that make life with Vista easier. The first is Start++, made by one of the MS devs. It adds some nice shortcut functionality the the start menu. The second is already built-in, but I was waiting on a Powertoy to do it. If you like the "Command Prompt From Here" powertoy, all you have to do to duplicate this functionality in Vista is Shift-Right_Click on a directory and select it from the context menu. Note that this only works in the right pane.

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