IntelliJ has 2 editions (free and ultimate), NetBeans has 5 edition (Java SE, Java EE, C/C++, PHP and All), even Microsoft, the king of too many product editions, has 8 editions of Visual Studio. Eclipse has 12 with one more on the way, and that’s just the packages available from eclipse.org.
Do we honestly believe that Eclipse users on average are more prone to specialization than users of all the other IDEs? I think we’ve taken this developer personas thing way too far. Instead of improving the user experience the silos allow us to pretend that usability is better than it actually is. If having everything installed results in a noisy experience, we need to fix those problems instead of hiding them.
But enough talk. We aren’t going to get anywhere by going on anecdotes and personal preferences. We need hard data on broad user preference. As such, I have created a bug to create the ultimate package and have volunteered to be the package maintainer.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=414025
If the ultimate package is ready for Luna, by Winter of 2014 we will have hard data on user preference. We can then come back to this discussion and re-evaluate the need for granular packages based on the download numbers.
Thanks,
- Konstantin
From: cross-project-issues-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cross-project-issues-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mickael Istria
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2013 7:38 AM
To: cross-project-issues-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Are too many packages actually hurting Eclipse?
On 07/30/2013 04:19 PM, Campo, Christian wrote:
Maybe its also because I do a lot of RCP development and always download the RCP packages for the Eclipse IDE. Recently I decided to do some WTP stuff for myself. And the easiest way for me was to download a WTP Eclipse IDE. So maybe you can say that I could have downloaded some features from the Kepler repo. But I wasnt sure what was necessary so I downloaded a new IDE. (Felt strange, but worked)
So after that I thought, maybe I would preferred an IDE that can do „everything java“ aka „ultimate“...
You usage of the IDE seems to show that even if you know it's possible to have everything in the same IDE, you prefered to download a second IDE and have an IDE for RCP and an IDE for Web applications development.
Your use-case seems opposed to what you're advocating for, so I'm curious: If you did not find the value of creating a "utilmate IDE" and prefered multiple IDEs, why do you think a "Ultimate" IDE would be better.
Here is my story to advocate against a "Ultimate IDE": I used to have much stuff in the same IDE for a few monthes, it contained my work stuff (mainly RCP) and some entertainment stuff (WTP, JBoss Tools and Android Dev Tools). My work tools and entertainment activities are not related at all. One day, I got angry of having too much stuff in that IDE and I spitted it because I used to get bugs coming from Android Tools when doing some RCP work, and WTP was doing some extra validation which was time consuming and because I was upset by many menus that are irrelevant; and the other way round, I got a lot of irrelevant noise and UI elements coming from PDE when doing to Web/Android development. Since them, I'm much happier in both of these activity-centric IDEs.
