No, seriously, I don't test for schwag, or for the cookie, though some muppets do. I test because I like to work on and with tools, sites, projects, frameworks... that just work, without jumping through hoops or needing to recite black magic incantations. (Which doesn't mean I won't accept schwag if people want to send it to me. So far the best schwag-like mail I've gotten has been a clown nose from Kim, but that's another story.)
Anyway, inspired by Ian's bad experiences today with Europa, I thought I'd try to reproduce them. I couldn't, but I got something IMHO worse. While there's ways to work around the problems I hit, the issue here is Newbie Usability. I've been hacking w/ Eclipse for 4 years. The point of Europa is to be easy to use for the first-timers, who don't know about things like the eclipse.ini file (I've never looked at that file until today) or any/all of the OSGi startup flags you can use.
So, to synthesize the Newbie experience further, I googled for "-Dosgi" and searched the Eclipse wiki, but the best I could find is passing mention of these flags in some 145 Eclipse bugs. Another usability issue, IMHO -- insufficiently quick-findable documentation.
Oh, wait, I think (while still wearing the Newbie hat), what about help.eclipse.org? Sure enough, it's documented as Eclipse runtime options. OK, that's cool, and that also means if I installed the SDK I have those docs in my Europa install, but if the problem is starting Europa in the first place, I still have to go hunting outside the Eclipse Help system. At least I've found what I wanted.
Back to the original problem... installing 121 out of 122 Europa features and watching as my Eclipse install crashes and burns on the first startup. Not cool. Second startup is better, but has problems on shutdown. Third time's the charm, apparently.
This whole experience brings to mind five, no, three questions, which I'll pose here and cross-post to the cross-project-issues-dev list too.
- Should the Buckminster SVN support be contributed to Europa, or
should it ONLY be on Buckmister's own Discovery or Update site, in order
to avoid a config problem right out of the box? I'd suggest it should
not be in Europa because of the negative perception it might cause
both Europa overall and Buckminster in particular. It portrays two
issues: (i) the full suite (122 features) doesn't work 100% out of the box, and (if
you'll forgive the rather damning phrase), (ii) "it's all Buckminster's fault". I don't mean to offend the good folks on the Buckminster team, only to suggest what *some* might say, and how to avoid that perception from ever being voiced anywhere but this rant. ;-)
- Since those who want SVN support need to add another Update site
anyway (or install SVN features manually some other way), is it so
onerous to ask those people to jump thru one extra hoop and remove the
hoop from everyone else who doesn't need/want SVN?
- Who in their right mind will need to install 121 features (451M) on
day one of their Europa experience? I, for example, only really need
about 75M of features on a regular basis (EMF, XSD, Mylyn, phpeclipse,
PDE, JDT, CVS) on top of the base 40M platform (68M unpacked).
I agree with Michael Scharf (who, incidentally, was the only person who could follow instructions) that Eclipse can be compared to ketchup in that it's:
[U]sed everywhere. It often does not fit. ... It comes in massive amounts (like the 18 million lines of code of the Europa release). It's often hard not to use it.
But that said, I don't think installing Europa should be harder than banging on the bottle to shake the last dregs of ketchup down the neck and onto my fries. It's hard *not* to use Eclipse, true, but should it be this hard to *use* it too?
