Meeting Notes for Planning Council 2025-09-03

[HeikoKlare]

Discussed Topics

• Status 2025-09
• UI best practices recommendation: Provide a link to the ui-best-practices and state expectations #59
• Machine-readable representation of SimRel release/milestone dates
• Copilot integration

Formatted Document Preview

https://github.com/HeikoKlare/eclipse-simrel-.github/blob/panning-council-2025-09-03/wiki/Planning_Council/2025-09-03.md

[merks]

Just one small fix.

[HannesWell]

* Machine-readable representation of SimRel release/milestone dates

This will be really helpful for RelEng tasks, thank you! I have drafted a possible use of this already in

• [RelEng] Compute release dates from provided SimRel dates eclipse-platform/eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator#3334

Is there any plan yet when this will be available? It would be great if it would happen in time before the 2026-03 cycle starts.
Do you need any assistance to implement that?
From our private discussion I know that you want to avoid duplicated definitions of dates and a single source of truth.
Would generating wiki markdown page (e.g. https://github.com/eclipse-simrel/.github/blob/main/wiki/SimRel/2025-12.md) from a template and with the dates of a release already be sufficient? In general I think a nicely rendered form would still be valuable for human readers.

[HeikoKlare]

Is there any plan yet when this will be available? It would be great if it would happen in time before the 2026-03 cycle starts.
Do you need any assistance to implement that?

We have not discussed whether or when to provide a machine-readable representation. I fully agree that having it would be beneficial, but currently I cannot put effort into it on my own.

The discussion was only about whether there are any arguments against it and especially whether the dates (milestones, RCs) can be automatically derived from the release date or whether they need to be customizable. The conclusion was that it is at least necessary to properly see all dates (in human-readable format) to agree on them, and that there are also some reasons that can potentially require the customization of dates:

• Demands for manual adaptation of default schedule:
  • Week around Christmas (and maybe Easter)
  • Individual Holiday dates are checked against the precise schedule (including RCs and milestone dates)

So in my understanding, the most simple and flexible solution would be to use a machine-readable format and explicitly define all dates (M1--3, RC1/2, GA) in it, and to use a markdown template or the like to generate a human-readable page with additional information on the different dates like we have now with the according markdown wiki pages.