> so they are actually
useful to end-users.
Actually, we have no evidence
that users find packages useful. They download them because
what else is there for them to do. Then if they are
experienced, they know what’s included and how to install
the missing pieces. If not, they thrash on forums wondering
why Eclipse for Java Developers doesn’t come with an XML
editor.
We can certainly measure the
value of maintaining a menagerie of packages. All it would
take is to put out an everything package alongside the
existing ones and compare download numbers.
While it wouldn’t happen
overnight, a single Eclipse IDE would have a unifying effect
on the community, ultimately leading, I believe, to higher
overall quality.
- Konstantin
On 07/30/2013 12:35 AM, Konstantin
Komissarchik wrote:
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?
I really don't think so.
Packages are a good way to start which includes most
available relevant stuff for release-train.
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.
A lot of people would feel
better with something lighter to achieve the same goal. If
Eclipse goes to 1.5G to download whereas NetBeans is 200M,
people would probably try NetBeans first, and adopt it.
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.
A frequent complaint is that
Eclipse contains too many things for usage, so many UI
entries make usage more complicated and confusing. I can
imagine that people doing some GMF stuff really don't want
WTP at all because it introduce a lot of new menus, so a GMF
user which is used to the Modeling package would spend more
time to find the relevant menus for his work, and this is
pretty annoying.
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.
Eclipse is very heterogeneous
in term of quality and ergonomics. That's something I'm
afraid that can't be fixed easily because of the community
being heterogeneous itself. Just hoping we increase and
unify the usage experience for all projects in the release
train seems totally unachievable.
Thoughts?
Although people complain
about installation taking some time, it's a yearly effort.
Having a single package with everything installed introduce
a lot of noise to end-user which can be very annoying and
reduce productivity every day. I really think that good IDEs
are not the ones that do everything, but rather the ones
that do correctly what we want to do.
Packages are not-that-bad, and it appears that most of them
already have an interesting number of downloads, so they are
actually useful to end-users. I don't see any indicator
saying that they are bad for adoption of Eclipse.
