An all in one IDE is a recipe for disaster and will contribute to even
more FUD around Eclipse.
Also I fail to see which improvements to the user experience can be done
since we would not have a specific persona to focus on.
Instead I think we should focus on improving the integrations between
the tools that are known to be installed together (yes ideally we would
need user input on this). IMO this will have a better chance of success
since it is much more focused and would also involve less ppl.
On 07/30/2013 12:13 PM, Konstantin Komissarchik wrote:
> so they are actually useful to end-users.
Actually, we have no evidence that users find packages useful. They
download them because what else is there for them to do. Then if they
are experienced, they know what's included and how to install the
missing pieces. If not, they thrash on forums wondering why Eclipse
for Java Developers doesn't come with an XML editor.
We can certainly measure the value of maintaining a menagerie of
packages. All it would take is to put out an everything package
alongside the existing ones and compare download numbers.
While it wouldn't happen overnight, a single Eclipse IDE would have a
unifying effect on the community, ultimately leading, I believe, to
higher overall quality.
- Konstantin
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of
*Mickael Istria
*Sent:* Tuesday, July 30, 2013 2:46 AM
*To:* Cross project issues
*Subject:* Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Are too many packages
actually hurting Eclipse?
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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