Official Eclipse
I actually had somebody say this to me:
“I can’t use a distro of Eclipse. My boss demands that we only use ‘official’ software from the eclipse.org site. By the way, does it work on Debian Linux?”
The blogging recently about including Subversion support in the Eclipse SDK made me think of this comment (I’m paraphrasing a bit) from the past.
Why does software have to come from eclipse.org? Nobody uses Linux; they use RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, or whatever. You don’t use Linux, you use Linux distros.
So why not explore distros? There are many. Check out the Eclipse Distros page for some of the ones we know about. Heck, you can even get a distro with Subversion support pre-installed.
If you don’t want to deal with plug-ins yourself, try a distro. Seriously. Do it now. You can still add plug-ins later if you want.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
It’s a good point, but part of the reason this works for Linux is because I can’t just go and get linux-2.x.x.iso from linux.org. People have been conditioned into using distros because they have no choice.
Linux is very much the exception rather than the rule, though. For almost all other open source projects, the default behaviour is to go to foo.org (or foo.sourceforge.net) and download foo_1.0.tar.gz.
Perhaps all the downloads should be removed from eclipse.org