Re: [ide-dev] Survey results

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/09/2013 05:14 PM, Eric Moffatt wrote:

What happened to the idea of scraping github for data ? This seemed like a great idea to me when it first came up and may provide further insight into our users 'real' preferences.

Do you, as a user, commit your preferences to GitHub?
I may be wrong, but I don't believe GitHub repositories can give real hints about IDE configuration.

For the more complicated cases (like the error / warning settings, themes...) I don't think that there is a 'correct' answer; there are simply too many variables (language(s) used, new vs legacy codebase...) to come up with a single setup that'll satisfy (let alone please) a majority of users.

I think that's something everyone is agreeing on: there is not a universally good answer.
My POV is that the IDE is also responsible for educating its users, and a good IDE has to encourage good practices when it comes to code quality. Code quality is closely related to maintainability and productivity on a longer-term. JDT Warnings are powerful, they are a too hidden gem of the Eclipse IDE.
I can imagine people would be glad to notice that with these rules enabled, they write less bugs with Eclipse Luna than they used to with previous versions.

Part of an ongoing strategy going forwards should be to enable the aggregation of this information as an install from the eclipse marketplace. This would mean that each developer community could set up what's most appropriate to them and if there are multiple solutions so be it; download the one *you* want. I realize that this is too resource heavy and long term for application to Luna but without multiple, easily accessible, choices we'll only ever be able to offer a 'one size fits all' solution into a user space where not everybody is the same. We're making a least a start to this in the platform focusing on themes / css but it's certainly been of great help to us (both resource and publicity wise) to be able to get new CSS themes from the marketplace. Note that we also get to leverage the 'social' aspects of using the market as well (rankings, easy to reference in blogs...).

Letting user download, install and customize what he wants is something that has been possible for years. It is what makes Eclipse a great platform. It's actually quite easy for an Eclipse developer to repackage the IDE with its preferences.
But the discussion here is focused on the Eclipse IDE that we as a the Eclipse community ship to 9M developers, and how we take care of helping the users of this IDE. How to make it look better to people who just take Eclipse IDE as it is shipped and don't spend much time in customizing it, how to make it better than NetBeans or IntelliJ. Choosing the best default preferences is part of making the IDE better. So there is no "one size fits all" solution, the goal is to find the settings that will give users a better impression of Eclipse IDE.
It's not because there is no universal solution that we should keep things as they are now, especially if popular demand (65%) ask for a change.

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets