Ganymede M3: First Impressions
With M3’s release just around the corner, it was time to try it out and attempt to install the updates to all my 3.3-compliant plugins. I decided to use Sun’s Java 6 runtime. Here’s a log of the experience:
Unpack eclipse-SDK-3.4M3-linux-gtk.tar.gz into /home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse34/, by hand or with this script.
Copy existing Eclipse 3.3-based .link files into /home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse34/links/:
eclipse-plugins-tweaklets.link
path=/home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse-plugins-tweaklets
eclipse-plugins-pdt.link
path=/home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse-plugins-pdt
eclipse-plugins.link
path=/home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse-plugins
eclipse-plugins-mylyn.link
path=/home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse-plugins-mylyn
Start up Eclipse in a fresh workspace to avoid any cross-version cruft:
/home/nickb/eclipse/eclipse34/eclipse -vm /opt/sun-java2-6.0/bin/java -data /home/nickb/eclipse/workspace2-34 -clean -vmargs -Xms128M -Xmx256M -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M
Add Ganymede Staging site:
http://download.eclipse.org/releases/ganymede/staging/
My plan was to install:
- UML2 Tools + prereqs [GMF, GEF, OCL, UML2, Query, Transaction, Validation, EMF],
- PDT prereqs [WTP, DTP],
- Buckminster, ECF, Mylyn, Monkey + prereq [Rhino],
- RSE (to try out the new SSH services),
- and to reuse my already-installed PDT + Zend Debugger, along with other 3.3-compatible features like:
- plog4u’s wiki editor
- ShellEd + Eclipse Colorer
- RSS View
- Beyond CVS
- Auto-Pin and Working Set tweaklets
Aside from some very odd categories, everything worked as expected. Current categories made finding things pretty painful, though.
- Rhino was in the “BIRT 2.3 - BIRT Team Provider” category
- Query (and several other Modeling components) appear as many as 4 times
- Mylyn features are spread across two generic categories, “Features” and “Integration”. These need to be renamed and ideally merged into one category.
- WST Common UI is in “Enabling Features”, as it probably was for Europa… but it’s the only one there now.
- GEF is in “Eclipse SDK M3″ category.
- RSE has a new SSH service, which will hopefully allow me to do what KDE’s kioslaves + fish allow: editing files on a remote server over an SSH connection
- TPTP’s category is called “TPTP is an open development platform supplying frameworks and services…” — looks more like their category description than its name/label
- Buckminster is in two categories for “core” and “optional”. This information could just as easily appear in the feature name or its description; as with Mylyn these categories should be merged
- I notice that some optional features can’t be deselected. What’s up with that? Are they optional or not?
- As in Eclipse 3.3, I hate the fact that if you minimize Eclipse and work elsewhere while it’s downloading, as soon as it’s done it pops to the foreground and if you hit space (because you were typing elsewhere, like in a chat window) you cancel the entire install. 30 mins of downloading lost with a single spacebar hit. If you agree this sucks donkey balls, please send some love over to bug 189523. I’d love to see a fix for this in both 3.3.2 and 3.4.0 (bug 205517).
After some cursing, I started the update again. All worked great this time as I made sure to not touch the machine when it got to about 50%. Seemed like it had to download everything a second time — shouldn’t all those jars have been cached somewhere?
Anyway, as you can see, I have my installed plugins spread across a number of install locations so that it’s easier to enable/disable them, or experiment with different versions. The use of .link files also makes it easy to reuse plugins in multiple Eclipse installs, for when I need to test with multiple Eclipse versions.
So, while not officially supported, I did get PDT 1.0 to work on Eclipse 3.4. This is exciting news considering that there’s no posted plan for when PDT 1.5 builds might start appearing. (Restarting in Eclipse 3.3, it appears that I didn’t break anything by installing Mylyn 2.2 on top of 2.1; in fact, it would seem that Mylyn 2.2 works on Eclipse 3.3.1.1 as well as 3.4M3. Woohoo!)
Bottom line: Installing Ganymede M3 is not significantly worse than installing Europa, but as this is the first milestone release, clearly lacks Europa’s polish. This is of course easily remedied and should be fixed soon enough.
Posted November 17th, 2007 by in category: ganymede, testing, update manager, usability, workflow
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5 Responses to “Ganymede M3: First Impressions”
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Ed Merks Says:
November 17th, 2007 at 09:14 am
Oh no, you’ve used the “R” word and after all the effort you went through with the release review theme song. Shame! If M3 is a Milestone Release, and RC1 is a Release Candidate Release, then is the final Release a Release Release or just a Release?
Erkki Lindpere Says:
November 17th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Also the naming of “Mylyn Task List (*Required*)” might be a little confusing, as it’s not really required in that context.
.releng » Blog Archive » Liberate tutume ex illa sollicitudo Says:
November 17th, 2007 at 01:29 pm
[...] Ed correctly points out, Ganymede M3 is not a Release in the sense of a it being a Gold Master (GM) though it is generally [...]
.releng » Blog Archive » You got 3.4 in your 3.3! Says:
November 19th, 2007 at 04:25 pm
[...] While I did manage to get PDT 1.0 to run on 3.4, I managed to break Update Manager [...]
Nick Boldt Says:
November 28th, 2007 at 08:35 pm
See also bug 211355.