Meeting Minutes for Planning Council 2026-01-07

[HeikoKlare]

Agenda

• State of Embedded CDT project

[ruspl-afed]

Regarding "Eclipse IDE for Embedded C/C++ Developers": I know this codebase relatively good and in theory can help to keep it alive. Also, my current area of interest is very close to its use cases.

However, I'm not a committer at this project and I know that current PL has tried to support wide version range of underlying components (Platform, CDT), which makes it very difficult to maintain.

[ilg-ul]

What does it mean 'EPP package is non-functional'?

[merks]

I assume it means that the product doesn't function, i.e., doesn't actually work or doesn't work properly. The fact that there hasn't been a +1 on the epp-dev mailing to confirm the product has actually been tested for almost 1.5 years is one of the concerns here...

[ilg-ul]

I assume it means that the product doesn't function

Given that there were still more than ten thousand downloads for each previous release, I have some difficulties to assume this.

[merks]

What would be great is if we didn't need to make any assumptions. That's why we ask (and expect) folks to test their packages and to verity that they tested their package.

[merks]

For what it's worth, I'd be personally very happy to see the package continue. To enable that, I think help is needed to keep things current and manage dependencies properly. I see that @ruspl-afed is offering such help. Best would be to take him up on that offer because he maintains things like Mylyn and Passage very well and know the processes very well.

[ilg-ul]

Sure, any help to keep the project current is welcomed.

[ilg-ul]

For reference, there are some efforts to update the dependencies:

• The content contributed to SimRel/EPP is very stale eclipse-embed-cdt/eclipse-plugins#646

[ruspl-afed]

Sure, any help to keep the project current is welcomed.

Very good. The price for keeping a project up to date is usually to reduce the range of supported older versions of everything, I assume you are aware of this @ilg-ul
Also we may need to reconsider the list of the 3rd party dependencies and the way we use them.
That may require modernization of releng scripts.
This is good time to start this effort, since we are in early 2026-03 M2 phase.

Committer role would be very helpful would be very useful for the implementation of this modernization plan.

[ilg-ul]

... reduce the range of supported older versions

I think Jonah is already investigating this.

This is good time to start this effort, since we are in early 2026-03 M2 phase.

If a full update will prove difficult, we can first update the dependencies to the latest Orbit for the 03 release, and do the rest of the work in a future release.

[jonahgraham]

EPP package is non-functional sounds too harsh of severity - but there are lots of bits not working. For a long time @ilg-ul has worked very hard to provide excellent support and documentation (as mentioned in the call, Embed CDT documents some parts of CDT better than CDT does), but at the moment I cannot get latest release through the getting started tutorial anymore due to changes in various parts of the stack including xpack, compiler version, CDT, and OS changes.

I will work to make specific reports as I bring the code up to date in regards Orbit, but these are the things I see:

• Tutorial does not work anymore due to prerequisites moving on (specifically latest qemu does not support the current tutorial)
• Example project blinky has many codan errors that used to not be there IIRC (is this due to regressions in Codan/CDT or due to newer compiler versions exposing issues in standard libraries because CDT expects C++ <= 17)
• xpm init hangs, so xpack example projects hang the IDE (this is documented already here: CDT's spawner can hang when launching bash in interactive mode eclipse-cdt/cdt#1151)
• Launching has degraded and the code that detects whether the qemu has launched successfully no longer works, preventing launching a debug session. I can connect to an externally launched qemu

@ilg-ul I don't know what the test procedure for an EPP release is and I haven't kept up to date with it recently. I appreciate your past efforts and understand that this is no longer part of your day-to-day (although you are still very responsive to every issue that comes in, regardless if you have time to fix it). What we need to do is figure out how to make this sustainable going forward, and part of that is knowing the current state of affairs.

[ilg-ul]

what the test procedure for an EPP release is

The test procedure is minimal, I just instantiate the xPack Arm or RISC-V template, compile the project and run a debug session via QEMU.

I'll try to update the documentation, after all functional issues are addressed.