m2e 0.12 release and the future of m2e
Sonatype recently announced the availability of m2eclipse 0.12. This release includes support for Maven 3.0 and many improvements in the HTTP transport code. This should be the last release made available from the Sonatype servers. But not to worry, we are not stopping the development. In fact, quite conversely, we are ramping up our efforts on the m2eclipse core and moving m2e to the Eclipse foundation.
At this point, the move has not been completed as we are still working with the Eclipse IP team to get all our code and dependencies reviewed. If all goes well, we are hoping to have everything moved to the Eclipse Foundation by mid-December. In the meantime the development is still happening on github but under the new org.eclipse.m2e name-space. We will keep you posted when the code has been completed moved.
m2e roadmap
I just wanted to let people know what’s been happening with m2e recently and what we’ll be focusing on in the near term. Recently, there has been a lull in the number of releases because we have decided that testing and quality are the priority so we had to take a step back and figure out a plan of action. The primary outcome is that we feel that the infrastructure for the testing needs to take precedence in order for everything else to fall into place. New feature development has to take a back seat to make sure the current functionality is flawless in execution. Quality is our primary concern, and this means that all new features have to be backed by a completely automated tests (including automated UI tests). As we have discovered, this is an extraordinarily difficult task to accomplish. Provisioning target platforms, meshing Tycho with Hudson for CI/Releases, and automating UI tests is not simple by any stretch of the imagination.
Nonetheless we’re committed to the task and we’ve hired Rich Seddon to create the testing framework and infrastructure. Our goal is to reach the standard set by Nexus which has so many integration tests that virtually nothing regresses and we can refactor and add new features without introducing new bugs. Unfortunately, we know from experience in our training classes and feedback from users that m2eclipse has not reached this level of quality and we are fully addressing this fact by committing ourselves to testing and quality. We probably should have pursued fewer features and more testing, but what’s done is done. From this point forward, testing is our primary concern. We will be able to add some new features, and do some architectural work to help stabilize m2e for the 1.0 but we’re basically going to be eradicating defects and adding the testing which will facilitate the convergence of m2e with the current Maven trunk and ultimately the Maven 3.0 final release. In this post, I’ll walk through what we’re doing at a high level and then try to layout a schedule for what’s going to happen in the next few months.
