[
Date Prev][
Date Next][
Thread Prev][
Thread Next][
Date Index][
Thread Index]
[
List Home]
|
RE: [platform-update-dev] Investigating some alternative update manager
|
IMHO the biggest problem with the update manager today is it can't update everything. Just the other day I was trying to help a co-worker who reported that a plug-in I wrote wasn't working. It turned out she was running Eclipse 3.0 and the plug-in required 3.1 or 3.2. She had no idea she was running a back-level version of Eclipse. "I've always run the update manager", she said, "and I assumed it would update me". I told her she had to install a whole new version of Eclipse so she did, and of course she unpacked it right on top of the old version before I could stop her. So I had her redo it in a clean directory, but then she lost all the add-ins she had collected (like CodePro) and had to reinstall those. This kind of thing happens all the time. I know exactly why it works this way but it's very user un-friendly.
The second biggest problem with the update manager today is it doesn't deal with different versions of plug-ins that are targetted to different versions of Eclipse. Case in point. We have an internal update site for plug-ins that employees have written. Recently someone wanted to upgrade an older plug-in to take advantage of a new feature in Eclipse 3.2. However they couldn't because users are running various versions of the Eclipse SDK including 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, or 3.3. And there's also the case of new Eclipse versions breaking old plug-ins that rely on internals (you know you write them). The manual work-around of having a different URL for each version of the SDK (updates/30, updates/31, etc.) is a pain to maintain and get everyone to use it consistently and doesn't scale. There should be a better way.
I wish I could help solve these problems with a code contribution but all I have time for right now is to complain about it and point to auto-updating programs like Firefox that seem to have solved it already. So if these kinds of issues can be addressed with "Update manager - TNG", that would be great.
--Ed
www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ebgwt/
