| M versions stable enough for using it in a company? [message #242793] |
Thu, 20 May 2004 10:33  |
Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: agent.smith.matrix.com
Are the M (milestone) versions of Eclipse stable enough to use them in a
company?
I mean Eclipse 3.0 M8 for instance.
The senior programmers are reluctant to new versions of programs. So I try
to convince them.
Do you wait for major versions in your company or do you use M versions? And
why?
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| Re: M versions stable enough for using it in a company? [message #243139 is a reply to message #242793] |
Fri, 21 May 2004 09:18  |
| Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: sean_dynan.nowhere.com
Agent Smith wrote:
> Are the M (milestone) versions of Eclipse stable enough to use them in a
> company?
>
> I mean Eclipse 3.0 M8 for instance.
Nope - not a chance. I use 3.0M8 now, and will move to M9 after
tomorrow. But nowadays I'm a one-man-band and a die-hard dabbler, so I
can reconcile myself to sorting out wrecked project files after M8 drops
its pants, which it does with alarming regularity for a product so close
to final release. It is definitely usable, but not stable enough for
widespread adoption by a conservative team. There's no way I would
recommend rolling out an Eclipse 3.0 milestone in a software dev
department, not unless every developer was a dabbler too. And in my
experience not many developers are.
> The senior programmers are reluctant to new versions of programs. So I try
> to convince them.
Well it sounds like your experience of senior programmers is the same as
mine (and I was the MOST senior engineer in my last company;-). They're
very conservative, which they have to be: time lost because of bad
decisions hurts delivery timelines, makes them look incompetent and
increases team stress in an era when ridiculous deadline-induced stress
is the norm.
It has been my experience that most developers are reluctant to try
alternative tools once they've built up a preferred toolkit and
methodology. They are usually happier to migrate to newer versions of
the same tools. If your team already uses Eclipse 2, and they are more
adventurous than my own experience has shwon, then you stand a good
chance of swaying opinion by becoming an Eclipse 3.0 evangelist of
sorts. Get very familiar with it yourself and demonstrate its positive
features and benefits at a later date, maybe by giving some of them a
very enthusiastic demo. In the meantime, when IDE discussions come up
in conversations, let them subtly know how brilliantly version 3 handles
such-and-such a feature, especially when it comes to its real time
coding assistance which, as far as I can make out, is head and shoulders
above the equivalent functionality offered in peer IDEs; it's a
*genuine* productivity boost.
Having said that, Eclipse has already gained an enormous amount of mind
share over the last year or so. The chances are high that Eclipse 3.0
will soon become very hard for your seniors to ignore.
> Do you wait for major versions in your company or do you use M versions? And
> why?
I would wait because of the reasons I gave above: a company is a
business and a software business lives or dies by its ability to deliver
to the market on time. Anything that detracts from the modern day
hyper-tight delivery schedules will be thrown away. Therefore stable
development products will win over unstable ones.
What's more, many Eclipse developers have to rely on plugins which may
not be available for 3.0 milestone releases, or may be unstable in 3.0
milestones. In which case there won't be any option but to stay on
Eclipse 2 until those plugins support Eclipse 3.
However, if your management doesn't mind what dev tools you use so long
as you deliver on time, then why not use Eclipse 3.0 in work yourself?
It is definitely usable, but I don't think it is stable enough for
widespread adoption by a conservative team.
--
Sean
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| Re: M versions stable enough for using it in a company? [message #243283 is a reply to message #243191] |
Fri, 21 May 2004 16:30 |
| Eclipse User |
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You are 100% right. I myself usually use milestone builds or stable
integration builds.
All I say is that milestone and integration builds are not for everybody.
Genady Beryozkin
http://www.genady.net/
Rafael Chaves wrote:
>Genady wrote:
>
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>>Besides, 3.0 release is almost here. You better wait for it, because
>>I think they won't be happy upgrading every week/month or so to fix some
>>bug.
>>
>>
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>In the other hand, it is good that people use integration/milestone builds
>and report bugs they find, that leads to better quality release builds.
>Otherwise, it may be too late when you find a blocking bug that your
>specific scenario happens to uncover.
>
>Rafael
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