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Bug 369395

Summary:	How or where can non-Sim Rel projects publish their "info center"?
Product:	Community	Reporter:	David Williams <david_williams>
Component:	Cross-Project	Assignee:	David Williams <david_williams>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	konstantin, margolis, mober.at+eclipse, nicolas.bros, sbouchet, webmaster
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:

Description David Williams

2012-01-23 10:10:13 EST

I was recently asked a question that even I did not know the answer to! (I know, I know, it is not that hard to do :)

There are some projects that have released ... maybe still incubating, maybe just off-cycle, maybe just not interested in being in "Simultaneous Release". (The question came from EDT, still incubating and not so far in a Sim Rel, but they have had releases ... the issue came up for them, since in wiki pages or tutorials, etc., they'd like to point to some "help" when they say something like "for more details see [http: some help topic]". But in this bugzilla, I'd like to address the issue from the general case ... not just one project).

Where can such projects "publish" their "info center" help?

One option would be the usual "Eclipse Help" info center, such as
http://help.eclipse.org/indigo/index.jsp

As far as I know, this has always been reserved for only projects in the Simultaneous Release. I guess, though, that is sort of an "unwritten rule".

Does anyone know if there are, already, exceptions to that rule?

I suppose there is no technical reason why other projects can not put stuff in there, but might be a little confusing to some users if they found some info in "Indigo Help" but the project was not installable from "Indigo Repo".

Another option, might be so have some individually running "info centers" for such projects, such as http://help.eclipse.org/edt/index.jsp ... but, I know that that may not be scalable, if a lot of projects wanted to do this.

Perhaps there could be one "special" info center for non-sim-release projects, such as
http://help.eclipse.org/specialcases/index.jsp

I will put this on the agenda for the February 1 Planning Council call ... I think it is be "Planning Council" decision if there is any rules about the "Sim Release Info Center" ... we should either say there is no rule, or we should make it explicit. It has always been implied by bugs such as
bug 348355 and bug 357602 but not sure if other options have come up before. (And, naturally, even if "planning council decision", we always work with community input too ... hence, this bugzilla entry is one way to get that).

Are there other options? How do others do it? Or, is it simply one of the perks of being in the Simultaneous Release?

Thanks for any insights.

Comment 1 David Williams

2012-01-23 10:11:58 EST

Assigning to self to avoid lots of "spam" notifications ... please add your self to CC list if you'd like to follow the discussion and resolution.

Comment 2 Martin Oberhuber

2012-01-23 10:31:44 EST

What about using the project vservers ?

Comment 3 Eclipse Webmaster

2012-01-23 10:56:57 EST

I think as long as we avoid running who knows how many independent infocenters on www.eclipse.org any of the other 3 options would work(to a point, we don't have enough resources to give every project a vserver)

-M.

Comment 4 Denis Roy

2012-01-23 14:19:42 EST

> I suppose there is no technical reason why other projects can not put stuff in
> there, but might be a little confusing to some users if they found some info in
> "Indigo Help" but the project was not installable from "Indigo Repo". 


By the same token, someone could examine the list of projects at Eclipse.org (http://eclipse.org/projects/listofprojects.php) and wonder why not all the projects are installable from "Indigo Repo".

If non-simrel projects want to publish Infocenter docs, I think help.eclipse.org/indigo is an acceptable location, provided the version of the software and docs are intended to work on Indigo.  In other words, a project putting out bits for Juno should not host docs in /indigo.

Doing this could also be an incentive for projects to align their releases with the simrel even though they do not participate.

Comment 5 David Williams

2012-02-01 15:58:00 EST

At PC Call today, there was consensus it would be just fine to let projects that run on Indigo, put their docs in Indigo help info center. 

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Planning_Council/February_01_2012#Other_Business

The only concern was for any extra workload on our already over worked webmasters, but I reassured everyone that our webmasters can do anything! Just kidding ... I actually said the webmasters themselves can decide how to "throttle" the work, if there's much demand. 

I'd like to close this bug as "fixed" since it was about "the policy". 

EDT should now open their own bug to get their doc jars into whatever info center they run on. Not sure where to suggest that be open. Perhaps just reopen or add to the original info center bug, such as bug 348355. 

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions.

Comment 6 Konstantin Komissarchik

2012-06-12 12:47:02 EDT

Just one problem with this resolution...

Suppose you have a project that publishes version 1.0 to simrel A. To follow SR rules, for A.SR1, they publish 1.0.1, for A.SR2, they publish 1.0.2, but also mid-year they publish 1.1 with new functionality.

In the above scenario what version of docs should simrel A infocenter contain? It must be 1.0.x line or users of simrel A aggregator repository will be quite confused. That leaves open the question of how to publish docs for 1.1 release.

Before anyone asks, this isn't a hypothetical question... Sapphire project ships a new feature release roughly every quarter, with roughly every fourth going into simrel.