I'm just back from EclipseCon and XtextDay in San Francisco, where we announced the new
2.8.0 release of Xtext and Xtend among
some other interesting developments. One of those is our...
Move to Github
In order to simplify the contributor's story, Xtext is taking part in the "
social coding initiative" of the eclipse foundation, and the primary git repository has been moved over to github. As a consequence we will no longer use gerrit for code reviews but github pull requests. Also it now makes more sense to fork, watch and star
our repository.
Xtext is of course still an Eclipse project!
Changing documentation in two clicks
The website has been reimplemented in
jekyll and the entire documentation is now written in github-flavored markdown. A link on every page that says '
edit on github' will open up a markdown editor on github, where anybody can do changes and propose them in form of a pull-request with a second click. This allows for wiki-style turnarounds but with a review and CLA check in it.
Just go try it out :-)
Automated setup
While documentation and website improvements can be made in the browser, you usually want to run some of our over 30.000 unit tests when you did code changes, or be able to compile and debug code. With a big project like Xtext that targets multiple platforms, the setup of a workspace and the corresponding tools is unfortunately not exactly simple. But fear not, this is all automated, thanks to an oomph setup. So even here it is only a couple of clicks until you have a fully working setup, that includes an IDE, the workspace, correct target platform, the team's workspace preferences and so on. Just everything you need and everything like we committer have it.
Code contributions
The team has many active committers that are very happy to review your high-quality pull-requests. If you want to start working on something it would be best if you pick up one of the
bugzillas flagged with 'v2.9' or whatever the upcoming release is in case you read this post at a later point in time. This is how we schedule the things we agreed on working on.
