Re: [ide-dev] [cross-project-issues-dev] Are too many packages actually

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxx>]

On 13-07-30 11:54 AM, "Andrew Ross" <andrew.ross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On 30/07/13 03:09, Krzysztof Daniel wrote:
>> On Tue, 2013-07-30 at 00:36 +0000, Doug Schaefer wrote:
>>> +1 for that. I've seen (and made for that matter) commercial products
>>> do that. Download a minimal p2 install with an Eclipse application
>>> that drives the rest of the install. We could ask for a list of
>>> languages or platforms they want to develop for and then install the
>>> necessary components.
>> I'm very skeptical about P2 in the downloader. It was created in the
>> past (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_Installer) and never made into
>> real world. AFAIK it would suffer from the same issues as regular P2 -
>> does require java to be pre-downloaded, no real integration with the
>> system (privileges elevation) and extreme vulnerability to users.
>>
>> I'd rather focus on opening P2 to 3rd party installers [1] and offered
>> users more OS-specific experience. No need to reinvent the wheel.
>>
>> [1] Bug 378329: Support 3rd party installers
>>
>
>Systems that manage software at the network level know how to talk to OS
>software management systems. This is a very big deal for many large
>companies and even quite useful for small & medium sized ones. It's
>useful to enable outreach as people would get Eclipse just like
>everything else... be it yum, pacman, zypper, apt, etc. Pity Windows
>lacks a proper software management system or at least did the last time
>I ran it.

Linux has it's solutions and vendors like Red Hat are doing a great job of
giving their users access to Eclipse. Mind you those installers are really
hardcore compared to the Windows installers (like NSIS) and Mac DMG
installers (drag-n-drop) or PKG installers.

Given there is still a huge majority of users that aren't on Linux, we
need a solution that runs on those other platforms. The more I think of it
and read the discussion here, the more I think it would be great to have
an Eclipse IDE installer/bootstrap UI thing that made it really easy for
new users, and veteran ones :) to pick the "components" they want in their
IDE.

Doug.