Lóránd Somogyi

Had enough. P2 gave me just too much headache.

Today I removed P2 from my two production Eclipse installation. What a relief…

Update Manager (UM) works fine, as it worked in 3.3. Installed AJDT, Q4E, SpringIDE, TestNG, AnyEdit, … without any issue.

At my last few tries, I managed to install AJDT successfully, but after it I locked myself out. At next install P2 were missing AspectJ feature, and were willing to do nothing.

I read somewhere that P2 will not let you install uninstallable or wrong software… well… no comment.

I still beleave P2 is “not an evil”, and it will turn out to be great. But now I think it came in to suddenly and with lot of missing features/bugs. – I know this is the best way to test it… , and I usually happily volunteer in these kind of testings, but not arbitrarily.

My frustration about Eclipse P2 from the last time grows…

I just wanted to add documentation for few plug-ins today. As usually those documentations are also plug-ins. P2 here we go…

Found the plug-ins in no time. Install…

And wait, wait, wait… (about 5-20 minutes!) while my eclipse is locked, as P2 is modal. Why? At least let me work while P2 figures out if those plug-ins would fit my installation.

Fortunately I can send the install part, – if everything is fine for P2, – to work in background, but that does not lasts so long usually.

As I learned so many times that things ain’t what they look like, I started to browse the Net (after 3h of cooldown). And I found a lot of pro and contra. There is even a recept how to replace P2 with UM.

Now as I retraced the whole thing one again, I can understand both parties. Developers are probably frustrated, while simple users are happy with it, – or at least will be…

I still do not feel P2 mature enough to replace UM (Update Manager), as there are missing features and obvious bugs.

Missing stuff:

• Resolve dependencies automatically – there are a hell a lot of plug-ins, sometimes I just can’t gather myself what do I need. – You need to know the software you’re installing… – this is no good for simple users…
• Show information about the plug-in and its dependencies. Instead of right click, properties…

I’m still frustrated, and I hope it is just because of the absence of the knowledge.

I still need to pull up my plug-ins for 3.4, so I’ll be learning soon…

Yesterday Ganymede arrieved. Fresh new Eclipse 3.4 and a tons of plugins as usually.

Some nice new features, feels like a bit faster. But! P2, the new “update system”… grrr. Okay, the old one was bad, I know. But it did work. It took me usually about 30 minutes to assemble an eclipse-jee with AJDT, subversive, q4e, mylyn exts and to import some of my workspaces. Today, with Ganymede and P2 it took me about 4 hours. Ouch. And I still do not have AJDT, and no dependency viewer from q4e.

I hope this will stabilize, and that this will pay off…