Here are some interesting numbers about Helios. At least I think they’re interesting.

• 39 Projects are listed on the Helios Participating Projects wiki page (many entries in this table include one or more subprojects);
• 54 sets of documentation were sent to the EMO for the release review (culminating in a call earlier today);
• 62 IP Logs were handed in for the release review; and
• 71 Projects participated in release.

So what does this say? Well, for one I think it says that the definition of “project” is a tad confusing. At Eclipse, a project tends to be an organizational unit. I have tried to make this better with the most recent iteration of the Eclipse Development Process (which takes effect on August 1st):

A Project is the main operational unit at Eclipse. Specifically, all open source software development at Eclipse occurs within the context of a Project. Projects have leaders, developers, code, builds, downloads, websites, and more. Projects are more than just the sum of their many parts, they are the means by which open source work is organized when presented to the communities of developers, adopters, and users. Projects provide structure that helps developers expose their hard work to a broad audience of consumers.

It then goes on to say this about releases:

Any Project in the Mature Phase may make a Release. A Project in the Incubation Phase with two Mentors may make a pre-1.0 Release. A Release may include the code from any subset of the Project’s descendants.

This wording suggests that it’s entirely up to a project hierarchy to determine how it chooses to release itself into the world (in retrospect, maybe I should have used words like “…roll up any subset of the Project’s descendents”). The Web Tools project, for example, produces a single release that includes eight (8) separate subprojects as one. For the Helios release review, they provided a single release document along with a single IP Log. Likewise, Equinox and p2 released together with combined release documentation.

I’m not exactly sure how we ended up with 54 release documents and 62 IP Logs. I’m actually a little surprised as I had expected that the number of release documents (54) would be equal to the number of projects that declared themselves as participating in the release train (39). I’ll need to sort that out in the coming days. For me, the most interesting number is the 54 sets of review documentation. To me this means that 54 sets of our projects identify themselves as one thing (that is–in some cases–the composition of several other finer-grained things).

Ultimately, though, the magic number is 39. This is how many projects that we’re telling the world participated.

From http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/wayne/2010/06/11/helios-by-the-numbers/