Although I've blogged about Eclipse several times before, I haven't considered those posts important enough to be syndicated on the planet. Well, with my new role as Google SOC mentor this is changed. Starting with this post, I'll occasionally blog about "An auto-configuration plugin for Eclipse" to put some light onto it and report on the progress.
To give you an idea of what this project is all about, let me repeat the applications abstract first:
"Many Eclipse plugins require the user to specify the location of certain programs or services running locally in order for them to work. Having humans do this is unnecessary since services are commonly installed in only a few fixed locations. Thus I propose writing an Eclipse plugin that uses a number of heuristics to locate local services that other Eclipse plugins need. I also propose including a number of utilities that enable developers to easily write, extend, and distribute these service 'scanners.'"
If you got a wish of what should be discovered, feel free to add use cases to the wiki page (we will compile the deliverable out of these use cases later). This is your change to influence the direction before the project has even started. ;-)