Staying Up To Date With Eclipse

I just had someone ask me how I keep up to date with Eclipse development. How do you know about such-and-such API or changes to this-or-that? It’s a good question and personally I don’t feel like I’m completely in tune with the happenings of the Eclipse community, but there are some resources I use to stay abreast.

• I subscribe to the Eclipse News RSS feed. This gives me very broad news about Eclipse events. Usually nothing too surprising here, but I’d hate to miss something so well broadcast.
• I also subscribe to a the Eclipse Planet newsfeed. This allows me to follow several Eclipse-related blogs.
• I subscribe to several of the developer mailing lists. Specifically, I subscribe to eclipse-dev and equinox-dev. Mailing lists are reserved for developer discussion only, so I only listen on these lists.
• Finally, I subscribe to several Eclipse newsgroups such as the GEF, SWT, RCP, and Equinox groups. I can’t keep up with the volume of messages, but I skim for interesting topics and whenever I’m trying to figure something out I search the newsgroups first. The newsgroups are an appropriate forum for users (such as myself) to ask questions.

These sort of steps are appropriate for keeping up to date with any particular open source technology. The real news always happens on a mailing list, newsgroup, or sometimes an IRC channel. That’s the place you want to lurk if you want to have a heads up on what’s happening.