Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Eclipse Galileo update site organization could be more useful

I saw Wayne's call for Mac users to try the Eclipse 3.5 RC1 Cocoa port. So being an Eclipse user and a Mac user, I thought I would give it a try out. I have been using 3.4 for my OSGi development work since it came out last June. I have updated to each point release and am 3.4.2 now. I started with the EPP for RCP developers since that very closely described what I needed to do. All that I needed to add to that was an svn team provider.

So I downloaded the 3.5 RC1 Cocoa driver, unzipped it and started it. But it was rather bare bones. I was missing the extra goodies from the RCP EPP download and, of course, an svn team provider. So I went to the Install New Software dialog and selected the Galileo site. But it took me quite some time to figure out what I needed to select to get back to the function I already had in my 3.4 install. It would have been much more useful to have the update organized like the EPPs. That is by the type of developer I am and the things I need to do. Then I could have found a grouping for RCP developer and installed all the things under that grouping. Since that was not there, I had to consult the 3.4 EPP pages to figure out what RCP EPP build added and then search for those things on the update site (as well as the subversive svn team providers sans svn connector :-( ).

So I think I have all the function I need installed, but it could have been much easier.

2 comments:

Eric Rizzo said...

It will be moot soon; the EPP packages for Galileo RC1 will be published on Monday and then you can just get the package you need.
As for organizing the Galileo repository by role or function, I'm not sure that would fit with how p2 works. I suppose maybe the Category headings could be used that way, but I'm not sure. I suggest starting a discussion on the p2-dev mailing list or the eclipse.simultaneous-release newsgroup. Or maybe enter a Bugzilla with the suggestion.

Ian Bull said...

Actually one of the nice things about p2 is that you can completely separate the categorization of the content from the content itself. For 3.5 I don't know if we will / should revisit the categorization as I'm sure there is no perfect solution. But moving forward, we could easily have different category repositories, so Java user could possibly point to releaseTrain/java and see things they care about.

Not sure if this is a good idea, but entirely possible.