[jbosstools-dev] FreeMarker plugin deprecation

[Mickael Istria]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 7:57 AM, Daniel Dekany <ddekany at freemail.hu> wrote:

> It can be the future, but it doesn't seem to be a short term solution,
>

It's nowadays the solution with the better short term ROI. There are big
chances that with the same amount of effort on FreeMarker LS and Eclipse
IDE integration of the LS, you get better results faster than with trying
to migrate code from JBoss Tools to Apache, from legal, releng and
technical POV.


> especially as my quick impression was that LSP4E is immature


LSP4E is already used in production-grade Eclipse based tools, such as Red
Hat Developers Studio or Spring Tools Suite and is the root for Eclipse
aCute (C#) and Eclipse Corrosion (Rust). If you have any bug with it, feel
free to report them to
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/enter_bug.cgi?product=lsp4e so they can be
considered and hopefully fixed.
If you used BlueSky, you probably got the 0.2.0 release of LSP4E installed.
LSP4E is about to ship 0.6.0 so that can explain why you found issues.
Please open bugs to BlueSky about the issues so some cycles may be spent to
upgrade to newer LSP4E and deliver more value.


> and
> considering that commit activity seems to be low (same worries with
> BlueSky, which brings the most extra value to us).


The commit activity of LSP4E is low because the project is actually mature
enough for most of its adopters and the project doesn't require continuous
daily work to work well. If you're used to GitHub pull request, then the
Gerrit process used to develop LSP4E indeed produces less commits but with
much higher quality (1 commit with Gerrit ~= 5 commits with GitHub PR,
because the typical "fix comment" or "applied suggestion" commits we see
with GitHub PR are on the Gerrit review and not in the history)...
The commit activity for BlueSky is low because at the moment, the project
is not "business-critical" to anyone and not so many users do report bugs,
so it's hard to figure out what can be done.
Please report bugs if you have any.


> I'm also not yet seeing if there will be enough momentum behind LSP4E.


There is already momentum behind LSP4E. You should come to EclipseCons or
similar tools oriented conferences to see how LSP is perceived by all major
players in the Tools domain as *the* solution to many problems, and how
LSP4E client is perceived as one of the best client for LSP, after VSCode.

To be clear, unless you are very experienced Eclipse developers,
maintaining Freemarker plugin as it will be a hard task, that has very big
chances of becoming too hard at some point to remain sustainable. By moving
it to Apache, you're not giving it a second life, you're mostly trying to
keep it alive a bit longer with a lot of efforts and less expertise as its
maitenance used to require.
Moving to LSP, you're bringing tools for FreeMarker to a new life with less
efforts (because most of the code is plain Java and not Eclipse-specific)
and you open the door for other tools such as Eclipse Che or VSCode to
support Freemarker properly. The LSP and LSP4E are really sustainable and
will remain maintained by experts of this domain, for free (from your
adopter perspective). This is the only sustainable path, and this is from
now on, not in the future.

Cheers
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