Insufficiently Random

I’ve probably posted something about this before. But I’m really getting fed up with the Eclipse Development Process. Its a frelling nightmare for a committer to work with. I’m really starting to regret moving JGit there.

Right now, if I have X hours to work on a project, I seem to be averaging what feels like X/2 hours in paperwork and other “important steps” of the development process. None of which have helped my project to ship higher quality, or more feature complete code. Which means either my or my employer’s time is being wasted. I don’t have time to waste when I have 108 bugs open in Gerrit Code Review, and 64 bugs open in EGit and JGit.

Based on a private email chain I’m having with the Eclipse IP review team, it looks like the initial EGit code contribution was bungled not just by myself, but also by the foundation’s IP review process. Which means I probably have to run EGit back through IP review, almost from scratch. But only after I write a script to datamine contributors out of the old EGit history and inject a complete, per-file git short-log into each file header. Its a good thing I have an awesome version control system like Git to keep these records for me. Too bad nobody else on the planet can use it to obtain information they might want to know about our source code. I guess running software to read information about a file is too scary for some individuals. So I have to do it for them. Now, and for every change we make in the future. Yay.

The astute reader may notice in that above paragraph, “private email chain” doesn’t jive with other publications from the Eclipse Foundation demanding that projects be run in an open and transparent manner (see how do I start a project on Eclipse Newcomers). I really do feel like JGit is a less open project now that it has moved to Eclipse.org. Conversations with the Eclipse IP team about the legal status of any contribution is always discussed by private email. These things never make it to the project mailing list. The IPzilla database is closed to everyone but committers. There are backroom deals going on about what our file headers should look like in order to sufficiently convey that the source code is under the new-style BSD. The discussion that led to the approval of the EGit IP log for 0.7.0, approved despite what appears to be an error in the initial review, also happened by private email.

It took a significant amount of effort on my part to even get JGit hosted at Eclipse.org. Originally, the new-style BSD license wasn’t permissible for a hosted project, and I had to seek a special exemption from the Eclipse Board of Directors. A process that required significant backroom conversations, over at least 6 months. Again, not exactly open. The only reason I think I haven’t pulled the project back is because of the huge initial investment I’ve already made in this.

Maybe JGit and EGit are just unique projects. But in my experience, I am not a unique snowflake, and neither is my work. I’m not as special as I might seem at first glance.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve lost at least 2 days every month to paperwork. That’s about 30 days, or 1.5 person-months since the project really started this move in January 2009. 1/12 of my time over the past year has just gone to catering to the Eclipse development process. Food for thought. Join Eclipse… make sure you pick up at least 1/12 of another full-time developer just to deal with the red-tape.

The part that really troubles me with the red-tape isn’t so much that it is there, but that committers bear the brunt of the effort, while large corporations that are strategic members reap the benefits of having a concise change history listed inside of each source code file, or knowing that every contributor who ever touched this source code has been grilled in detail on a bug tracker.

So back to my post title. The real tragedy is, these corporations who sell commercial products based on top of Eclipse.org distributions are pushing not just the open source development work, but also a whole ton of onerous legal and reporting constraints back onto their project committers. Its enough to make this committer start to reconsider things. I wish I had been using a time clock this past year, to accurately record how many days the Eclipse development process has robbed me of since the start of all of this. It feels significant enough that if I went to my manager with it, I think he’d go ballistic.