Lunch with Ben and RedHat Canada

Last Friday I had the pleasure of lunching with some of the RedHat guys in Toronto: Tom, Ben, Andrew, Igor, Bryce and Ben's office mate who I'll refer to as Rasputin, since I forgot his real one. Lovely sushi (thanks, Ben!). In true geek style, we mostly discussed shop, in this case, Java, Linux, Eclipse and gcj.

It was rather serendipitous that I ended up there in the first place. The previous Friday, I was out with John here in Waterloo, and we ran into Ben at Ethel's (which is not just any waterhole, I'm told). I had already had a few encounters with Ben over at bugs.eclipse.org, so it was pleasing to see how small the world can be. He invited me to drop by Toronto so that we may discuss the future of Eclipse packaging on Linux.

Together, Igor, Andrew, Ben and I went through Ben's master plan for The New Way of compiling Eclipse plugins outside the Eclipse UI. The thing's still pretty much on the drawing board, but looks rather good. The best part is that Ben's paid to do this stuff, and that all distros will instantly profit once it's out.

In short, the plugin does what you would expect from any sane development environment: it allows you to compile any plugin from the command line, instead of forcing you to do this interactively inside the environment. Anybody who claims that this can also be done with the "Create Ant Build File" in the PDE is a liar, and should be forced to try packaging a few dozen such plugins before being allowed a second opinion.

After the Master Plan had been agreed upon, Ben took me around the UofT campus and taught me the basics of trespassing through highrise buildings. To prove his skill, he successfully managed us through two closed cocktail parties, in plain sight, without anybody asking us a single question.