I have to admit, I am one of the worst committers when it comes to responding to newsgroups. I have a tough time just keeping up with cdt-dev and bugzillas and writing code and … that I never seem to have time to go to the CDT newsgroup to see what people are talking about. Don’t vote for me in the Top Committer category, that’s for sure.

But I went there today to announce CDT 3.1.2. I guess this is the first time I did since I got my new laptop a couple of months ago (see!) and it downloaded all the messages since the beginning of time. It was interesting. There are over 12000 messages since the first one where John Duimovich launched it on December 10, 2001. The talk then was on today’s CDT’s predecessor from IBM which was very different (and some lives on today in the Remote Systems Explorer from DSDP/TM).

The first message after John’s was from ‘dominic’ who started a thread of fans that were drewling over the idea of a C/C++ tool in Eclipse. There were a few posts from people who had great feature ideas, like ant support and UML modeling (which funny enough is what got me into the CDT). People were concerned that the team wasn’t testing using the funky new GTK support on Linux available in early access form with Eclipse 2.0. And, of course, people were asking, if you can do C/C++ how about supporting Cobol and Objective C too.

It’s pretty good reading and gives a great historical background on the evolution of the CDT. And it’s a bit spooky since I hadn’t even heard of the CDT at the time and all this activity was happening. But the coolest thing is the diversity of people that posted then and post today. It certainly is a great way to keep in touch with the community outside the cdt-dev walls. And I’m probably the last committer to see the value in participating, which is now my late new year’s resolution…