March 2015 retrospective

The time has gone by fast!

Much was accomplished last month.  Jiri modified the clusters.properties config, and we now have a "real" Python build again!  http://hg.netbeans.org/core-main/rev/95c14a4ab557

This has made building much more straightforward, and we can build NBMs locally as well. Debugging is working well for me using Netbeans 8.0.2 and tryme-debug

The conversion from GSF to CSL (Parsing & Indexing) was largely completed, and has been integrated and backported to the development repository at Netbeans.org with good results. Thanks to Ralph and Julio for this. 

Ralph has cleaned up several bugs, and is working on Project2 (Python Projects using Setuptools), and I have been working on PythonPlatformManager, particularly with Autodetect. I could use an engineer that has a Mac, since the typical Python setup appears to be different from both Windows and Linux, according to testing performed by Serhii.

Speaking of testing, last month I was happy to recruit Solaris Developer Tim Foster to perform QA of NetBeans Python support on the Solaris platform.

While Geertjan and Ralph were at NetBeans Day Netherlands, they met Vincent Van Der Leun, who subsequently volunteered to be an Engineer on the Python Project! Vincent is a Java OCPJ and skilled Python developer who has worked for many years at a Netherlands-based startup.

Please give Vincent and Tim a warm welcome [thunderous applause]!

Upcoming tasks - In addition to working through the bugs at bugzilla, in the coming month we will be onboarding new Engineers and QA Analysts, upgrading our bundled platform to Jython 2.7 and making some substantial improvements to our NBPython.org website.

Stay tuned...