Another potential solution that should be on the list for
consideration is a reasonably smart installer.
That's great question I was asking myself looking at
the Download page the other day. I don't think I have a
great answer though.
I like the idea of the big uber package for the
reason you list as #3. I'd like to fix our tools
plug-ins to play nicer together. Having this package
would give us a test bed to work towards.
But it's probably not a great idea for end users, at
least not yet. And it certainly isn't a good idea for
the Eclipse infrastructure and would chew through way
too much bandwidth.
Maybe we can use or adapt the Ecilpse Marketplace to
make it easier to load up components. The p2 UI is
pretty tough on new users. Marketplace client is a much
better experience but it's still hard to discover
things. But we could provide our own catalog to
accomplish this goal.
Doug.
There are twelve packages
currently listed on the downloads page, not
counting the promoted ones. Are so many packages
actually a benefit to users? We try to define
packages based on developer profiles, but real
developers rarely fit a profile. One of the most
common complaints that I have seen on forums are
related to difficulties in getting an Eclipse
installation that has all the pieces that the
developer requires. The ironic thing is that we
go through a lot of trouble to define a common
repository with components that are known to
work with each other, but then fragment the
result into a dozen different packages.
Would user experience be
better if there was only one Eclipse package on
the main download site that had pretty much
everything that’s in the aggregated repository?
Some of the reasons for not
doing that…
1. The package would be
too large. With modern download speeds, I
suspect most users would rather wait a few
minutes longer for Eclipse to download than
spend time later trying to figure out how to
install the missing pieces. The disk space
difference is also inconsequential these days.
2. The users prefer to
not include pieces in their installation that
they don’t use. I can see that being the
case for some advanced Eclipse users, but I
don’t believe this holds true across the user
base. I suspect that most users would rather
spend time on their development project than
tuning their Eclipse installation.
3. Too many plugins in
one installation leads to poor user
experience. If there are problems like
that, we should be identifying and fixing them.
Thoughts?
- Konstantin
