The Eclipse Release Train

The Eclipse planning council has set a goal of releasing several of its top level projects at the same time in its next major release. While there are a lot of benefits of doing so, we know that it is not easy to coordinate software development within one team, let alone among several teams from different projects with developers around the world. It will be a true test on the maturity of Eclipse development process, PMCs, project leaders, and developers. The BIRT project has opted to get on the Eclipse release train. The plan is to synch up with the rest of the projects in a milestone build before the end of this year. This exercise will help us work out issues and give us confident that we will be able to release together in the summer of 2006. Release often and test often is the key to get the train moving.