A bit belated, but I’d just like to throw out my $0.02 of congratulations to everyone in the Eclipse ecosystem for another on-time release train.  It’s been said 1000 times, but bears repeating at least 1000 more — one of the keys to success of the Eclipse ecosystem is it’s predictability.  A new release train comes the last week of every June.  Service Releases come out predictably in September, and February — and repeat.  Tool chains relying on Eclipse can be assured that every June there will be a stable release to base upcoming product plans and scheduled upon.  It’s an important success criteria that can’t be overstated. 

Having worked at the Eclipse Foundation for almost 6 years, I can say achieving this goal is not trivial.  It requires a lot of feature management by the projects (a polite way of saying, features get deferred to the next train if there’s any doubt of making it).  It requires a lot of synchronization across project dependencies and lots and lots of milestones.  It requires an engaged ecosystem that’s banging away and testing up and downstream – and a feedback loop to pick up issues early.

So congrats to Eclipse and those in the ecosystem!

 – Don