Thursday, May 22, 2008

A p2 Success Story

With all the good / bad and the ugly posted about p2 lately, I thought I would share a positive experience I had today with Eclipse, Modeling and p2.

It all started when I saw a new video about ECore tools. If you haven't seen ECore tools, and you are a fan of EMF, you really should check it out. (It will likely be featured in my Ganymede Top 10 List). After the video I decided to take ECore tools for test run.

1. Grabbed the latest Ganymede milestone for modelers.

2. I launched Eclipse and tried to create an Ecore Diagram (using Ecore tools)

Problerm: the Ganymede package for modelers doesn't contain ECore tools.

3. I launched Help->Software Updates and searched for ECore tools



4. Ok, no ECore tools... So I selected "Manage Sites" and selected the Ganymede Site



5. Now when I search for ECore tools, p2 returns some Installable Units



6. After selecting Install, and accepting the license, Eclipse suggested I restart



7. And in less than 5 minutes, I was up and running with ECore tools.



While I realize that there are still bugs / features / requests outstanding, this was the first time in all the simultaneous releases that it truly felt like I could just point at a piece of software, and have it up and running without worrying about dependencies, 3-5 minutes to load the UM, broken connections, etc...

I know p2 doesn't work for everyone, but the negative comments often seem to overshadow the positive ones, so I thought I would share with everyone the good experience I had.

Note: I did not write this to start a war, or downplay the problems people are having; this was simply my experience today.

5 comments:

Tiran Kenja said...

Erm.... Apart from the search window, what exactly is the difference in this from the old Update Manager? The steps are exactly the same.

Ian Bull said...

I tried the same thing with 3.3 (topcasted have a version of ECore tools that works there).
1. The UM took more than 3 minutes just to come up.

2. There were dependency issues with GMF that could not be properly resolved (I had to install GMF separately, then restart eclipse).

3. The install failed when my connection was dropped, but it got 1/2 installed so I had to disable some features and install again.

4. Then I could install EcoreTools.

Yes, in theory it was the same steps, but this time things just seemed to work! With 3.3 I restarted Eclipse 4 times.

Pascal said...

Tiran, a few main differences. You don't have to pick your site, you don't have to pick a mirror, you don't have to click the required button and whatever you install will work.

SeuAndré said...

P2 rulez!

Kevin McGuire said...

Thanks for the positive post Ian. Generally people are silent when things "just work" because well that's what we expect them to do! But that silence provides a highly unbalanced view of the real situation.