Re: [ide-dev] Some Infos About Oomph

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/28/2015 08:39 PM, Doug Schaefer wrote:

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.

I agree with Doug.
I don't think people want to deal with multiple instances of their IDE, they want only one, which adapts to the current activity to show relevant stuff. We have perspectives for that in Eclipse IDE, and if you look at reports from new enthusiast Eclipse users, that's something they love.
All due respect to Oomph initiative on that point, I don't believe that end-users want to be able to provision multiple IDEs, or want multiple IDEs in general. Defining and maintaining one IDE per project or language is more something that project teams might like in order to make sure their users get the right stuff, but it's not an end-user's dream.

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.

+1.
IMO, giving flexibility is "just" a matter of giving an introduction to the Eclipse release train and marketplace when user start IDE for the first time. An introduction video on the welcome page or a wizard with screenshots of how to browse the release train and marketplace might be sufficient. Then suggesting users some automated actions (such as "Do you want to install your Marketplace favourites in your IDE") would be nice. I don't think the installer as it is now would help users to know better what they want and what's available.
Oomph profiles are interesting, but since Oomph is targeting project teams who want to define a project-specific IDEs (including SCM repos, target-platforms and other, that cannot be packaged properly as RCP), I have the feeling that it's an overkill technology for the goal of providing easier 1st experience with the "generic" Eclipse IDE.

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Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
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