Group Proposal, for discussion: IDE & Tooling support

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

(This is not a call for votes; it is just a call for discussion.)

At the last OpenJDK Committer Workshop in Brussels, we agreed to set up 
some channel in which to discuss issues related to OpenJDK tooling, and, 
more specifically IDE support. We already have pretty comprehensive 
support for OpenJDK development in both IntelliJ and Netbeans, but the 
main, long standing problem has been one of lack of adequate 
communication and coordination between these various efforts, which 
often led (frustrated) developers to the path of "I'll write my own 
support".

The goal of this group is, first and foremost, to extensively document 
the alternatives that are already available at present, as well as to 
capture discussions related to tooling support which are currently 
scattered among many mailing list (compiler-dev, jtreg-dev, build-dev). 
After some internal discussions, it feels like proposing a group is the 
right thing to do because: (i) a group automatically gets a mailing list 
and a page on openjdk.java.net - which can be useful for communicating 
within the group and also for publishing the much needed documentation; 
also (ii) a group is not tied to any specific set of deliverables 
(unlike, say, an OpenJDK project), which feels right in this case, as 
IDE support is likely to be a recurring activity.

We want OpenJDK to be a welcoming place for developers, and I feel that 
improving IDE/tooling support plays a crucial role in reducing the 
activation energy required to start hacking on the OpenJDK codebase.

Thoughts?

Cheers
Maurizio