Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2008-03-26

p2: Planned Parenthood (v3)

P2 is ready to drop this week.

And, like a human birth, it seemed like a great idea 9 months ago, has started to cause some pain and annoyance to its parents (the p2 developers) and relatives (the early adopters in the community), and comes with much excitement & some trepidation. (And some bugs.) I kid. ;)

Bear in there, though. As with human births, people will remember not the pain of birth, but the years of joy to come.

What's that you say? How can you help? Download the latest good Eclipse platform w/ p2, try it out, and report your successes/problems. Documentation from the newbie/end-user experience & related testing is (IMHO) urgently needed. If you configure your plugins with .eclipseextensions (eg., Update Manager) or .link files, just unpack zips or use some other approach, try p2 and see if the new dropins folder format or installer work for your usecase. Note also this patch, should you encounter a similar glitch.

Meanwhile, p2's proud parents have already started working on the nursery pending their new arrival: there' already a lot of documentation out there for you to explore.

People, don't blog when sick, tired, and under the gun to deliver 8 project builds. You risk being misread, as I clearly have. Apologies to those that saw and didn't appreciate the previous edits of this post.

4 comments:

Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

There may be a bit of pain in the beginning... but it's time for a new "update" story.

imho, the p2 team is doing a good job to ensure everything hasn't gone down... they are working on sensitive areas in Eclipse and have done a good job in keeping things relatively stable.

Of course communications can be improved, but that is something the Platform team is always working on.

nickb said...

Agreed -- definitely time for the next generation to be born, er, provisioned.

And yes, the pains so far have been minor and have been attacked very quickly.

It's just too bad that EclipseCON and p2's debut overlapped or we'd have been kicking the tires two weeks ago.

Kim Moir said...

Nick, I appreciate that the intent of this post in to encourage others to try out p2. However, I find the comparison of p2 to babies missing limbs and weird kittens permutations, to be blunt, very unprofessional. I'm sure that you can appreciate that if someone in the community called an a new modeling project that had just hatched out of incubation "a mutant" this comparison would not be well received.

Anonymous said...

yeah, this is totally wrong. C'mon man!