Comments on: Equinox Update Interview http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2009/04/15/equinox-update-interview/ Eclipse Equinox OSGi Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:17:31 +0100 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 By: Michael Scharf http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2009/04/15/equinox-update-interview/comment-page-1/#comment-1344 Michael Scharf Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:34:01 +0000 http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/?p=1271#comment-1344 Great interview -- I hope your vision of "choose what you want" will become true soon. Whenever it comes to installation eclipse plugins I get a high level of frustration. In the last years, I have lost hundreds of (frustrating) hours with installation (just 1h/week sums up to 400h in 8 years, and I am sure it is *much more*) . I hope at some point in time eclipse delivers what it promises: easy installations.... What's the frustration? - finding the update sites is the current problem no 1 (it is like hand resolving dependencies) - having different eclipse share the same plugins is not really supported from the UI - if something goes wrong with the installation, there is no way to figure out what's wrong (Just a few hours ago I tried to install egit and something went wrong -- the about dialog showed that the feature is installed. -clean did not help. -console and "diag " showed nothing. The old update manager showed me a nice error marker on the feature but no way to figure out what the error is) OSGi/p2 in eclipse is like a 1000 horse power engine in a 1930ies Volkswagen beatle -- great technology but too powerful so it can destroy its "host". What is missing? The end user story/perspective/mental model. It is too complicated/powerful to be mastered by normal users. The attempts to create a simple UI on top are doomed to fail, because they try to 'fake' a something that is not there and when something goes wrong, the errors do not fit into the "simplified model". For example: features are technology driven but the user wants to get "products" not countless fine granular features with cryptic names and strange dependencies. I hope for the epp wizard-- but every time I try it, I don't get past the first page -- with cryptic errors like: "Cannot find solution following requirements Match[requiredCapability:" Am I bitter? Yes somehow -- 8 years of eclipse and the promise of an extensible platform seems further away today than 8 years ago (when we had an installation perspective). P2 is the eclipse version of the "windows installation/shared dll/registry nightmare" -- I am so happy that lot's of programs on windows are now available as "Portable Software" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application).... I am waiting waiting for "Portable Eclipse Plugins"... Michael Great interview — I hope your vision of “choose what you want” will become true soon. Whenever it comes to installation eclipse plugins I get a high level of frustration. In the last years, I have lost hundreds of (frustrating) hours with installation (just 1h/week sums up to 400h in 8 years, and I am sure it is *much more*) . I hope at some point in time eclipse delivers what it promises: easy installations….

What’s the frustration?
- finding the update sites is the current problem no 1 (it is like hand resolving dependencies)
- having different eclipse share the same plugins is not really supported from the UI
- if something goes wrong with the installation, there is no way to figure out what’s wrong (Just a few hours ago I tried to install egit and something went wrong — the about dialog showed that the feature is installed. -clean did not help. -console and “diag ” showed nothing. The old update manager showed me a nice error marker on the feature but no way to figure out what the error is)

OSGi/p2 in eclipse is like a 1000 horse power engine in a 1930ies Volkswagen beatle — great technology but too powerful so it can destroy its “host”.

What is missing? The end user story/perspective/mental model. It is too complicated/powerful to be mastered by normal users. The attempts to create a simple UI on top are doomed to fail, because they try to ‘fake’ a something that is not there and when something goes wrong, the errors do not fit into the “simplified model”. For example: features are technology driven but the user wants to get “products” not countless fine granular features with cryptic names and strange dependencies.

I hope for the epp wizard– but every time I try it, I don’t get past the first page — with cryptic errors like: “Cannot find solution following requirements Match[requiredCapability:”

Am I bitter? Yes somehow — 8 years of eclipse and the promise of an extensible platform seems further away today than 8 years ago (when we had an installation perspective). P2 is the eclipse version of the “windows installation/shared dll/registry nightmare” — I am so happy that lot’s of programs on windows are now available as “Portable Software” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application)…. I am waiting waiting for “Portable Eclipse Plugins”…

Michael

]]>