Group Proposal, for discussion: IDE & Tooling support

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

So, one of the thing that emerged at the OpenJDK Committer Workshop was 
mainly the need of having a place where to discuss IDE related issues.

While build-dev and build-infra in general are all fine places to have 
these discussions (and we had some of these in the past), there are 
things that are suboptimal in our current approach:

* specificity: build-dev has a lot more traffic on a lot of issues that 
have nothing to do with IDE support
* scattered-ness: somethings, yes, will rely on build support to 'do the 
right thing' - but most of them don't see the jtreg plugin support in 
IntelliJ. That lives in code-tools and has nothing to do whatsoever with 
build-dev or makefiles, even. All discussion related to that is 
happening on jtreg-dev.

So, we need a place for discuss things, and to provide documentation of 
_what already_ exists. At the moment, honestly, I'm much less interested 
into adding more features into the various supports we have.

Do we need a separate repo to do the documentation part? I don't think 
so. And that's what led us to consider forming a group. Now, I don't 
feel too strongly about this - but a Group doesn't strike me as a choice 
that doesn't make sense either.

As a closing comment, of course whatever we do might be affected (or 
affect!) build system components - so I'm not proposing we discuss 
things in a vacuum; but I want to stress the importance of centralizing 
all discussion and documentations in a place that feels 'independent' 
from compiler-dev, build-dev or jtreg-dev.

Maurizio

On 05/03/2019 11:10, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> I agree that providing a great IDE experience is a very beneficial 
> thing, both for existing OpenJDK developers, and for attracting new ones.
>
> Is this goal is best served by creating a new group? I don't know. I'm 
> a bit skeptical, and think that this work still fits quite well under 
> the Build Group umbrella, but if this is not the general perception, I 
> will not protest against creating a new group.
>
> Also, an alternative to creating a group is to create a Project. I'm 
> certain the Build Group could sponsor an IDE Integration Project, or 
> something like that. A Project can also get mailing lists and repos, 
> but does not need to have a Group Lead that needs to perform 
> additional duties like sending a yearly status report, etc.