Re: [ide-dev] Some Infos About Oomph

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxx>]

From: Mike Milinkovich <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx>

On 28/01/2015 1:30 PM, Doug Schaefer wrote:

But the question will come back to who decides what goes in that list. I know Wayne is helping drive some of this. But it would be good to have a benevolent dictator or committee pick out the best packages that would be of the most benefit for as many people in the community as possible. It’s a political mine field, to say the least. And I’ll leave it at that before I say anything I’ll regret :).

It is possible that none of this makes sense for the default installer used by millions just to get a working Eclipse running on their desktop.

However, the ability to create, store and share Oomph profiles which describe the various configurations of language editors, tools, etc. could be the solution you really want. I think we can all agree that dramatically reducing the time and effort to install and configure an Eclipse workbench is a worthy goal. Plus the ability to save an executable description of that installation for later use, or to share with your friends and colleagues.

Well, no, the experience I’m looking for is the one I got recently installing the community edition of Visual Studio and had when installing Xcode. They just give you everything at a push of a button. Big, yes, 5+ Gig big, but a pretty good experience and bloat isn’t really noticeable once you’re going.

But if we’re not going to do that, I’m just thinking, by only offering install of Eclipse Packages one at a time, you’re not really getting much more benefit than you have with the existing Downloads page. There are a few discussions happing here and there in bugzilla about people wanting a more flexibly way to pick and chose content at install time. And again, this is a feature that most installers provide for you.

Profiles are cool and everything, and we can certainly use them here to help our co-ops get up and running faster for example (which is why we were looking at Oomph earlier), but that’s an advanced use case. I’m more concerned about the new user at the moment and how we can ease them into Eclipse with a great install experience, or at least a familiar one, and give them easy access to all the great plug-ins in our ecosystem.

Doug