People want to drive "big" changes from the beginning but in reality it doesn't work that way in no FOSS project - one has to start with small things, not so small, slightly bigger, big, bigger, huge, etc. People that are dedicated go through the process and gain the ability to change so much for the reason that there is not that many other people working on the platform.
Is this perfect - NO, not at all. How can it change? There is only a single way I see - more people start contributing - but not contributing the next big thing - help us revive the platform. Things like:
- improve test suite - no big change can happen if the committer is not at least partly sure that nothing bad happens. That's a huge opportunity for people wanting to join as it doesn't require that much deep knowledge from the beginning. E.g. in SWT it was a test infrastructure work (~100 commits) just to modernize to the state where there is one test suite for all platforms with all the quirks in it to make it possible to run from maven build in a sane way. And tests can be run from the maven build run but still fail!!!
- bug triaging - Yes, having 1142(at the time of writing) open bugs for SWT/GTK only is not helping me see new problems. Verifying bugs, producing snippets that make it easier to reproduce, patches that fix it or simply closing the bug cause it has been fixed long ago. This is really valuable help as it is huge time drain. Reports that are vague or too big don't get that much attention as the current amount of people is already having problems driving the next release!!!
- cleanup the codebase - Making use of new features available for years, standardizing on given idioms, removing deprecated. All these boring things that make it easier to not be afraid of change, to jump into the project easily, to verify things easily, etc.
- improve the build system - Huge task and huge time drain for potential contributors. If the build takes so much longer than needed even without running the tests in it, how can someone easily verify a change. Yes, I mean building the whole platform and running all tests to verify that you're not breaking something few layers above you.
If/when we get the things above done - jumping into the problem space would be way easier and there would be enough people with experience in it already so we don't get to this state again.
With so many Eclipse users and people unhappy with the current state of affairs maybe it's time to try different approach. Is this the right one? No idea. Will it work? No idea either, but there is only one way to know it - let's try.
This is plea to the people that haven't been involved into Eclipse and wondered whether they can help improve - Yes, you can.
P.S. These are my own thoughts and doesn't represent a statement from any of the Eclipse groups I'm member of.
