Thursday, January 17, 2008

Stellation Archives

Several years back there was an interesting open-source Eclipse project named "Stellation" at www.eclipse.org/stellation. It was to be an advanced/modern version control tool with lightweight branching and support for fine-grained checkout at the logical/semantic level.

Then about 2-3 years ago it just up and disappeared. I tried doing several websearches for it, but to no avail. Then on the revctrl mailing list I saw someone inquire about it, and I chimed in too wondering where it had gone.

Karl Fogel (of CVS and Subversion fame) replied with exactly what I was looking for ...

You can get the whole project archived as a tarball here:

http://archive.eclipse.org/technology/archives/stellation-project.tar.gz

It used to live at http://www.eclipse.org/stellation/. Those pages have been pulled, with no redirect left behind (a bit annoying when an open source project does that!). But a search on eclipse.org pulled up this thread:

http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.foundation/msg00766.html

...which pointed to...

http://www.eclipse.org/technology/archived.php

...which pointed to the above tarball. Summary from the archive page:
"Stellation is a software configuration management system designed to be an extensible platform for building systems based on the integration of advanced or experimental SCM techniques with the Eclipse development environment. The Stellation project will be using this system to integrate support for fine-grained software artifacts into the Eclipse environment, with particular focus on dynamic program organization, and inter-program coordination.

The Stellation website, newsgroup, mailing list, source code, and latest download are available in a compressed tar archive (110Mb) [http://archive.eclipse.org/technology/archives/stellation-project.tar.gz]"


So now you know! (and so do I).

1 comment:

MarkCC said...

I can give you even better information on what happened to Stellation. I was the technical lead of the Stellation project.

What happened to it was IBM.

Stellation started as a project at IBM research. I started the Stellation project several years before IBM acquired Rational. When the Rational acquisition went through, the people that funded the project inside of IBM decided that it didn't make sense to pump money into an open-source free system that could be seen as competing with ClearCase, which was now a profitable IBM project.

So I basically had to give up working on Stellation. Since I was the lead/coordinator, when I stopped working on it, the outside contributors basically abandoned ship - no one else had the time to invest in leading the project, and I wasn't allowed to.

A lot of the ideas that Stellation was based on wound up in Rational's Jazz project. Since I left IBM a little more than a year ago, I haven't kept up on the status of Jazz, so I don't know exactly what's going in with its availability. But if you were interested in Stellation, I'd take a look at it.