Hi,
Today I had to assist a user in upgrading from Luna to Mars. He
didn't do it so far because he was a bit lazy to re-download a
package and re-install all his favorite bundles. I told him about
the upgrade, ant the first thing he tried was "Check for updates",
that didn't work. Then he had to look for help on Google to do the
upgrade. He reached a StackOverfow post that was not very positive
about Eclipse IDE, but that drive him to the solution of adding and
enabling the releases/mars URL and then trying Check for Updates
successfully.
IMO, there is one lesson to learn from this user story: some users
expect "Check for updates" to provide updates.
I believe in order to provide that, it's mainly a matter of creating
a releases/latest URL that would reference the latest release and be
updated whenever necessary, and to enable this URL in Eclipse EPP
packages by default.
Now the question is more: "Is this something we want to do?". For
the plain Eclipse IDE user, I believe it would be profitable since
updates would be more accessible. The doubt remains on the plugin
providers: in case they don't have their content ready for the next
release when it happens, then it means that user can reach a worse
state when they update, because of those 3rd-party plugins. However,
good management of dependency versions should be able to spot that
and at least show an error (with remediation) when trying to update.
What do you think it best: auto-update to new major, or expect users
to do the steps mentioned above to adopt the latest improvements?
|