| Re: [ide-dev] Photon IDE, by Eclipse |
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Mickael, I'm not sure which thread you wanted to the discussion is in.
Certainly there are technical problems, e.g., having an
eclipse.exe, an eclipsec.exe but no photonc.exe in the folder, but
those are just details to fix... Let me say up front that I hate this idea. But before explaining
all the reasons why I hate it, I want take a step back because I
still question what fundamental problem(s) are we trying to solve
and what we could or should do to solve them. I believe that Mike has mentioned that establishing a strong
brand takes millions of dollars over several years. The Eclipse
brand is well-established and strong. One problem---the one I
believe you are focused on---appears to be that the brand is
strongly (too strongly?) associated with the Java IDE, so your
solution appears to be to replace Eclipse with Photon (or with
${whatever}) in as many places as possible to try to change that
situation. Unfortunately I don't believe this will in any way,
shape, or form improve anything for the IDE itself; the IDE does
not need to distinguish itself from any misconception of what
exactly it is. It is the Eclipse Foundation as an organization that needs to
ensure its brand is distinguished from the Java IDE, and it is
each of Eclipse's non-JDT projects that need to ensure its Eclipse
sub-brand is also strong. But I don't feel that this should be
done at the expense of the IDE itself; the IDE will not benefit
from a weakening of its established strong brand. I also feel
that the recent creation of the Java EE project as an
Eclipse-hosted project will go a long way toward changing
perceptions about all that it means to be be "Eclipse", though
even here one might argue that the perception will remain too
strongly associated with Java. That being said, Mike mentioned
that a large C++ community perceives Eclipse as a C/C++ IDE, but
of course that community is small compare to Java. I also question, what will really change if all the users should
see Eclipse as a Java IDE suddenly realize that Eclipse is just a
great place to host open source projects. Will they come out in
droves to host their projects at Eclipse? And would we even want
that if there were no associated financial investment in the
Eclipse foundation? I doubt that changing the perceptions of IDE
users will have any important impact at all. The end users are
not the ones making decisions about whether to host important open
source projects at Eclipse, so this as a focal point seems
misdirected... But let's just suppose for a moment that this were a brilliant
idea. Who is planning on rewriting all the long-established
documentation to correct all the technical details related to
folder and file names? E.g., to point out that it's now
photon.ini you need to edit, not eclipse.ini, unless you have an
older version. Who will migrate all the scripts that make
assumptions about file/folder names that will need to be
rewritten. Will I be able to update from Oxygen to Photon;
goodness knows we never seem to get that quite right? Will
there now be a .photon hidden folder in the home folder and will I
have to migrate my .eclipse content to the .photon folder and will
that be annoying if I ever use an older and a new Eclipse IDE at
the same time? So my point is that surely even if it were brilliant to rebrand
the IDE, which I doubt, we most definitely should restrict
ourselves to the visible branding (splash screen, translable
strings, web pages) and avoid changing technical artifacts names
because that will be highly disruptive to any existing
documentation, scripts, and other infrastructure. Regards,
On 26.10.2017 18:52, Mickael Istria
wrote:
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