On the Eclipse website, it is documented that v2.2.0 will be part of Photon. Is this still current? Just as I see that 2.2.1 has been out for 3 months already.
I take it there’s also no plan to get v2.2.2 in?
Either way, any idea what would be the latest date to have a PR accepted in time for 2.2.2?
To be precise the latest 2.2.x release is intended for inclusion on the Photon release. We never want to rush anything because of the release train, we just contribute the latest stable version that is released before the deadline.
As of 2.2.2, I don’t think we’ll actually release it unless a high priority bug appears. All development effort goes to the 3.0 development branch at the moment. At the current state, all PRs merged to master are also merged to the release-3.0 branch.
We never want to rush anything because of the release train
Yes very wise, and about as I expected.
The main thing I was thinking about for Photon was PR 692 since, at least in my experience, the top headline feature of v2.2.0 - issue 354 - is still quite broken.
FYI: I hope to continue to dabble a bit and try and fix a few more tickets of interest to me. Getting set up to build was surprisingly easy, but navigating the foreign code was not insignificant effort, so I figure I may as try and get some further mileage from the knowledge before I forget it. 
But none of that is urgent.
I’ve also made a small breakthrough towards issue 689, in that I have custom builds of Gradle running via Eclipse Photon. Experimental hacks into the code look promising. is that something you’d like outside help with? Or would you prefer that one gets designed properly in-house, since it’s a key feature? I will probably need to ask some questions - e.g. getting some help with usage scenarios etc. if I were to take it on.
If it’s a bigger change I suggest we should agree on an implementation outline before you get started with the coding. Let’s discuss the details on the ticket.
Just one quick note on the IDE setup. If you work on the release-3.0 branch, it should work better as no external libraries are needed. Just activate the tooling-e47.target (or e48) target definition and the code should compile.