On 07/30/2013 12:35 AM, Konstantin Komissarchik wrote:
Would user experience be better if there was only one Eclipse package
on the main download site that had pretty much everything that's in
the aggregated repository?
I really don't think so.
Packages are a good way to start which includes most available relevant
stuff for release-train.
1. *The package would be too large.* With modern download speeds, I
suspect most users would rather wait a few minutes longer for Eclipse
to download than spend time later trying to figure out how to install
the missing pieces. The disk space difference is also inconsequential
these days.
A lot of people would feel better with something lighter to achieve the
same goal. If Eclipse goes to 1.5G to download whereas NetBeans is 200M,
people would probably try NetBeans first, and adopt it.
2. *The users prefer to not include pieces in their installation that
they don't use.* I can see that being the case for some advanced
Eclipse users, but I don't believe this holds true across the user
base. I suspect that most users would rather spend time on their
development project than tuning their Eclipse installation.
A frequent complaint is that Eclipse contains too many things for usage,
so many UI entries make usage more complicated and confusing. I can
imagine that people doing some GMF stuff really don't want WTP at all
because it introduce a lot of new menus, so a GMF user which is used to
the Modeling package would spend more time to find the relevant menus
for his work, and this is pretty annoying.
3. *Too many plugins in one installation leads to poor user
experience.* If there are problems like that, we should be identifying
and fixing them.
Eclipse is very heterogeneous in term of quality and ergonomics. That's
something I'm afraid that can't be fixed easily because of the community
being heterogeneous itself. Just hoping we increase and unify the usage
experience for all projects in the release train seems totally unachievable.
Thoughts?
Although people complain about installation taking some time, it's a
yearly effort. Having a single package with everything installed
introduce a lot of noise to end-user which can be very annoying and
reduce productivity every day. I really think that good IDEs are not the
ones that do everything, but rather the ones that do correctly what we
want to do.
Packages are not-that-bad, and it appears that most of them already have
an interesting number of downloads, so they are actually useful to
end-users. I don't see any indicator saying that they are bad for
adoption of Eclipse.
--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat <http://www.jboss.org/tools>
My blog <http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com> - My Tweets
<http://twitter.com/mickaelistria>
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