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Workbench User Guide => Getting Started => Basic Tutorial => The Workbench says "(You can get the Welcome view back at any time by selecting <Help > Welcome>.)" The link is broken, and the Callisto (3.2RC1) Help menu has NO Welcome menu item.
There must be something seriously wrong with your setup. What did you install as the base? 'Welcome' menu item was there forever and you can find it in all recent Eclipse SDK downloads. There must be something wrong with your particular Callisto download.
Installed 3.2RC1a platform (Build id: I20060419-1640), then did a Software Updates => Find and Install... => Search for new features to install => Callisto Discovery Site and selected everything. Hmmm, I have 3.1.1 installed and well-used... you're right, Welcome is right up there at the top of the Help menu. I have 3.2M6 (platform only) ... no Welcome. 3.2RC1 (platform then Callisto update as above) ... no Welcome. I tend to get Callisto releases as soon as they're available... is it possible documentation trails the actual releases? I just re-ran the 3.2M6 minimal installation and tried Software Updates => Find and Install... => Search for updates of currently installed features... there was nothing found to install.
Are you sharing your configuration dir and/or workspace with, say, an RCP app that doesn't have that menu? Can you try clearing your config dir and try a clean workspace?
> there at the top of the Help menu. I have 3.2M6 (platform only) ... no Welcome. Exactly. Welcome is bound to org.eclipse.sdk product, not the platform itself. This is the reason you are not seeing welcome when SDK is not your base.
Might I (not so humbly) suggest this is not only a bug, but a "great bug" from a Callisto perspective? READ the bug report. I'm not reporting a bug in the SDK, I'm filing it on the platform, the base for all of Callisto. A CLEAN installation of the platform will give you Help => Help Contents that lists Workbench User Guide as the first and SOLE help item, and the FIRST PAGE of that Help (The Workbench) says... well, read it in the original bug report: "You can get the Welcome view back at any time..." It's a lie. You can't. It's not there. And you say it isn't supposed to be there. Okay, then don't say this in the documentation you provide WITH THE PLATFORM. And if "SDK != Callisto Platform + some Callisto discoverable set of installation plugin(s)", we need to stop telling people in Callisto-land to "start from the platform"!
David, your $.02? The problem with starting with the platform is that platform is not a product and has no intro associated with it. Consequently, no 'Welcome' shows up in the Help menu. We only associate intro with Eclipse SDK (org.eclipse.sdk).
Dejan, actually, I think there is a "platform product", but, yes, may not have a welcome screen (currently) and may not even be being installed as part of "minimal runtime". I think this issue is similar to bug 130502. But, this is only $.01 ... I don't have a recommended fix yet :) But, I do agree its a "bug", I'm "glad" someone from the community noticed it, I would not want to recommend someone start with "whole SDK" for Callisto, just to enable welcome screen! Randy, just to clarify ... do you acutally "miss" some functionality the welcome screen as providing ... or, are you just commenenting that some documentation is inaccurate? Thanks,
Randy's problem is that documentation claims that one can open Welcome from the 'Help' menu but this menu item is missing in the platform.
What I miss is the ability to point people at the obvious place to get started. This all came about as I was about to respond to the frequent request for help with getting started on eclipse.newcomer, when I realized I hadn't seen the "Welcome" screen in a while. I decided to see how to get at something like "getting started" from a naive user point of view, and found I could no longer recommend then going to the Help=>Welcome route, much to my surprise. Then the "bug" was obvious when I realized the self-referential documentation was a null-pointer! I'm no fan of the Welcome splash screen itself... I found it an annoying change for 3.1 (?). But Help=>Welcome is desparately needed for new users.
OK, it turned out that we didn't bind org.eclipse.platform.ide product to the Universal Welcome. I copied some files, customized intro a bit (the beauty of the new UW preference page :-) and it shows up now. The problem is that there is very little content in the platform itself - only two Overview links and some 'What's New' content. All the tutorials and samples are in JDT and PDE. Perhaps Callisto components that come on top can provide some Welcome content here? PDE has a nice template now for creating Universal Welcome page contributions, so it is very easy to add content there. Curtis, please test the future builds by downloading Eclipse platform only and making sure Welcome is showing.
I like it. I was pleasently surprised to see the welcome screen back in RC2 (just hadn't been paying attention to status of this bug). And while there's a few glitches to iron out (e.g. bug 140036) I do think this has turned out to be an example of a great bug. And not because Randy nominated himself in comment #5 :) But because Dejan's efforts to "correctly partition" all the functionality will set a good example for many other Eclipse projects to follow ... users really are getting closer to being able to have a "minimal install" without all that massive eclipse sdk stuff :) and then with each feature they add, they get more and more on the welcome screen (as well as more and more functionaliy, of course). Well, in theory, anyway. Not sure there is time enough for other's in Callisto to really participate fully in this new welcome screen stuff, but, again, sets a great example of how to "build up" to a good experience for the more novice users. Thanks for persisting, Randy, and Dejan. Now ... if only you could do the same for capabilities to solve in bug 130502 ... :)
