In my work with GEF I usually check out the newsgroups when looking for a solution to my current problem. I have noticed more than once that the solution exists in GMF, but wasn't contributed back to GEF and instead exists only for GMF users. I am really curious as to how this happens - especially when one of the stated goals of GMF is to contribute to GEF where possible. It seems that contributing fixes back to the source plugin would have several obvious benefits. Besides making these things available to a larger audience, this would make for more modular source trees and easier code maintenance.
I'm wondering if this exists in other projects as well and what can be done to help this problem (or if this isn't really a problem). I'm sure part of the issue has to do with the usual, time constraints and lack of resources, but here it would seem that it could actually be more efficient to back-contribute rather than trying to copy a chunk of code across projects and modify it to fix a bug or add a feature.
It is really not my intent to pick on specific projects - I only use GEF/GMF as an example because its one with which I'm familiar. And I really appreciate all the work that's been done there to date.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Cross Project Contributions
Monday, June 4, 2007
Anti-Alias bug in 3.3 with GEF
I've been fighting a particularly nasty bug in Eclipse 3.3 lately and since I finally found the culprit, I wanted to post it in case other GEF developers encounter it before it's fixed.
Symptoms:
- Thumbnail in outline view won't show some edit parts
- Connection parts don't show until after editor is reopened in same session
graphics.setAntialias(SWT.ON)Commenting out this call fixed all the problems I was having. Now my edit parts don't look quite as good, but since I'm counting on being able to use 3.3, I'm just happy there is a workaround. I'm hopeful that this can be fixed by the final Europa release.
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